Lysis here approaches openly one of the greatest difficulties of nature, that which in all time has furnished to the skeptics and to the atheists the weapons that they have believed most formidable. Hierocles has not concealed it in his Commentaries, and he expresses it in these terms: “If God is able to bring back all men to virtue and to happiness, and if he does not will to do so, is God therefore unjust and wicked? Or if he wills to bring them back and if he is unable, is God therefore weak and impotent?”[639] Long before Hierocles, Epicurus seized upon this argument to support his system, and had extended it without augmenting its force. His design had been to prove by its means that, according as he had advanced it, God does not interfere with the things of this world, and that there is, consequently, no Providence.[640] Lactantius, thinking that he was answering this, has quoted from Epicurus and has afforded Bayle, the most learned and the most formidable of modern skeptics, the occasion for demonstrating that, until now, this terrible argument had remained unrefuted notwithstanding all the efforts made for its overthrow. This indefatigable reasoner said: The evil exists; man is wicked and unhappy: everything proves this sad truth. History is, properly speaking, only a miscellany of the crimes and adversities of mankind. However, at intervals, there have been seen shining some examples of virtue and happiness. There is, therefore, a mixture of evils and of moral and physical goodness.… Now, if man is the work of a sole principle, sovereignly good, sovereignly holy, sovereignly potential, how is he exposed to the maladies of cold, heat, hunger, thirst, pain, and sorrow? How has he so many wicked inclinations? How does he commit so many crimes? Can the sovereign sanctity produce a criminal creature? Can the sovereign bounty produce an unfortunate creature?[641] Bayle, content with his anti-providential declaration, believes that he has triumphed over all the dogmatists of the world; but whilst he recovers his breath, observe that he admits a mixture of good and evil, and allow him to continue. “Origen,” he said, “asserts that evil has come from the wicked use of the free will. And why has God allowed man to have so pernicious a free will?” “Because,” Origen answers, “an intelligent creature who had not enjoyed free will would have been immutable and immortal as God.” What pitiable reason! Is it that the glorified souls, the saints, are equal to God, being predestined to good, and deprived of what is called _free will_, which, according to Saint Augustine, is only the possibility of evil when the divine grace does not incline man towards the good?[642]