VI. Impiety produces also a second objection, which directly tends, not so much to the crimination of God, as to the vindication of the sinner; though the sinner whom God condemns cannot be justified without the disgrace of the Judge. For this is their profane complaint, Why should God impute as a fault to man those things which were rendered necessary by his predestination? What should they do? Should they resist his decrees? This would be vain, for it would be impossible. Therefore they are not justly punished for those things of which God’s predestination is the principal cause. Here I shall refrain from the defence commonly resorted to by ecclesiastical writers, that the foreknowledge of God prevents not man from being considered as a sinner, since God foresees man’s evils, not his own. For then the cavil would not stop here; it would rather be urged, that still God might, if he would, have provided against the evils he foresaw, and that not having done this, he created man expressly to this end, that he might so conduct himself in the world; but if, by the Divine Providence, man was created in such a state as afterwards to do whatever he actually does, he ought not to be charged with guilt for things which he cannot avoid, and to which the will of God constrains him. Let us see, then, how this difficulty should be solved. In the first place, the declaration of Solomon ought to be universally admitted, that “the Lord hath made all things for himself; yea, even the wicked for the day of evil.”[507] Observe; all things being at God’s disposal, and the decision of salvation or death belonging to him, he orders all things by his counsel and decree in such a manner, that some men are born devoted from the womb to certain death, that his name may be glorified in their destruction. If any one pleads, that no necessity was imposed on them by the providence of God, but rather that they were created by him in such a state in consequence of his foresight of their future depravity,—it will amount to nothing. The old writers used, indeed, to adopt this solution, though not without some degree of hesitation. But the schoolmen satisfy themselves with it, as though it admitted of no opposition. I will readily grant, indeed, that mere foreknowledge lays no necessity on the creatures, though this is not universally admitted; for there are some who maintain it to be the actual cause of what comes to pass. But Valla, a man otherwise not much versed in theology, appears to me to have discovered superior acuteness and judiciousness, by showing that this controversy is unnecessary, because both life and death are acts of God’s will, rather than of his foreknowledge. If God simply foresaw the fates of men, and did not also dispose and fix them by his determination, there would be room to agitate the question, whether his providence or foresight rendered them at all necessary. But since he foresees future events only