What an admirable spectacle is that of the eternal destinies of all
beings chained to the throne of the maker of all worlds! I imagine a
time when it is not so, but a chimerical liberty makes every event
uncertain. I imagine that one of the substances intermediate between
us and the great being (there may be millions of such beings) comes
to consult the eternal being on the destiny of some of the enormous
globes that stand at such vast distances from us. The sovereign of
nature would be forced to reply: “I am not sovereign, I am not the
great necessary being; every little embryo is a master of destiny.
The whole world is free to will without any other cause than the
will. The future is uncertain; everything depends on caprice. I can
foresee nothing. This great whole, which you regarded as so regular,
is but a vast anarchy in which all is done without cause or reason. I
shall be very careful not to say to you that such and such a thing
will happen; for then the wicked folk who people the globes would do
the contrary to what I had foretold, if it were only from malice. Men
always dare to be jealous of their master, when he has not a power
so absolute as to take away the very faculty of jealousy; they are
pleased to see him fall into a trap. I am but weak and ignorant.
Appeal to one more powerful and more gifted than I.”
Possibly this allegory will avail more than any other argument to
arrest the partisans of this empty liberty of indifference, if there
still be any, and those who labour to reconcile foreknowledge with
this liberty, and those who, in the university of Salamanca or in
Bedlam, still speak of medicinal and concomitant grace.