Man ascribes to God the faculty of foreseeing, or knowing beforehand whatever will happen; but this prescience seldom turns to his glory, nor protects him from the lawful reproaches of man. If God foreknows the future, must he not have foreseen the fall of his creatures? If he resolved in his decrees to permit this fall, it is undoubtedly because it was his will that this fall should take place, otherwise it could not have happened. If God's foreknowledge of the sins of his creatures had been necessary or forced, one might suppose, that he has been constrained by his justice to punish the guilty; but, enjoying the faculty of foreseeing, and the power of predetermining every thing, did it not depend upon God not to impose upon himself cruel laws, or, at least, could he not dispense with creating beings, whom he might be under the necessity of punishing, and rendering unhappy by a subsequent decree? Of what consequence is it, whether God has destined men to happiness or misery by an anterior decree, an effect of his prescience, or by a posterior decree, an effect of his justice? Does the arrangement of his decrees alter the fate of the unhappy? Would they not have the same right to complain of a God, who, being able to omit their creation, has notwithstanding created them, although he plainly foresaw that his justice would oblige him, sooner or later, to punish them? 74. "Man," you say, "when he came from the hand of God, was pure, innocent, and good; but his nature has been corrupted, as a punishment for sin." If man, when just out of the hands of his God, could sin, his nature was imperfect. Why did God suffer him to sin, and his nature to be corrupted? Why did God permit him to be seduced, well knowing that he was too feeble to resist temptation? Why did God create _satan_, an evil spirit, a tempter? Why did not God, who wishes so much good to the human race, annihilate once for all so many evil genii, who are naturally enemies of our happiness; or rather, why did God create evil spirits, whose victories and fatal influence over mankind, he must have foreseen? In fine, by what strange fatality in all religions of the world, has the evil principle such a decided advantage over the good principle, or the divinity? 75.