Bayle, after several outbursts of this sort, finishes by declaring that the way in which evil is introduced under the rule of a sovereign being, infinitely good, infinitely potential, infinitely holy, is not only inexplicable but even incomprehensible.[643] Bayle is right on this point; also I have always said, in the course of this work, that the origin of evil, comprehensible or not, could never be divulged. But the matter of the origin of evil is not the question here. Bayle was too good a reasoner not to have felt it, not to have seen that the argument of Epicurus, and all the elocution with which he furnished it, did not bear upon the cause of evil itself, but upon its effects; which is quite different. Epicurus did not demand that the origin of evil be explained to him, but the local existence of its effects――that is to say, one should state clearly to him, that if God was able and willing to take away the evil from the world, or to prevent it from penetrating there, why he did not do so. When any one’s house is the prey of flames, one is not so insensate as to be concerned with knowing what the essence of the fire is, and why it burns in general, but why it burns in particular; and why, being able to extinguish it, one has not done so. Bayle, I repeat, was too clever a logician not to have perceived this. This distinction was too simple to have escaped him; but seeing that its very simplicity had concealed it from the doctors of the Christian church, he was content to affect an ignorance of it to his adversaries, to have the pleasure, so precious to a skeptic such as he, of seeing them one after another exhaust themselves upon the argument of Epicurus: God, whether he wills to take away evil, and can not; whether he can and does not will to; whether he does not will it nor can; whether he wills it and can. If he wills it and can not, he is weak; which does not accord with God. If he can and does not will it, he is wicked; which accords with him no better. If he does not will it nor can, he is wicked and weak, which could not be. If he can and wills it, that which alone is worthy of his divinity, whence then come the evils? Or why does he not take them away?[644]