The second reason that may confirm the distinction of free from compulsion, and free from necessitation, he says, is that ‘God and good angels do good necessarily, and yet are more free than we’. This reason, though I had no need of it, yet I think it so far forth good, as it is true that God and good angels do good necessarily, and yet are free. But because I find not in the articles of our faith, nor in the decrees of our Church, set down in what manner I am to conceive God and good angels to work by necessity, or in what sense they work freely, I suspend my sentence in that point; and am content that there may be a freedom from compulsion, and yet no freedom from necessitation, as hath been proved in that, that a man may be necessitated to some actions without threats and without fear of danger. But how he can avoid the consisting together of freedom and necessity, supposing God and good angels are freer than men and yet do good necessarily, that we must now examine. “I confess,” saith he, “that God and good angels are more free than we, that is, intensively in degree of freedom, not extensively in the latitude of the object, according to a liberty of exercise, not of specification.” Again we have here two distinctions that are no distinctions, but made to seem so by terms invented, by I know not whom, to cover ignorance, and blind the understanding of the reader. For it cannot be conceived that there is any liberty greater than for a man to do what he will, and to forbear what he will. One heat may be more intensive than another, but not one liberty than another. He that can do what he will, hath all liberty possible; and he that cannot, has none at all. Also liberty (as he says the Schools call it) of exercise, which is, as I have said before, a liberty to do or not to do, cannot be without a liberty, which they call of specification; that is to say, a liberty to do or not to do this or that in particular. For how can a man conceive, that he has liberty to do any thing, that hath not liberty to do this, or that, or somewhat in particular? If a man be forbidden in Lent to eat this, and that, and every other particular kind of flesh, how can he be understood to have a liberty to eat flesh, more than he that hath no license at all? You may by this again see the vanity of distinctions used in the Schools; and I do not doubt but that the imposing of them by authority of doctors in the Church, hath been a great cause that men have laboured, though by sedition and evil courses, to shake them off; for, nothing is more apt to beget hatred, than the tyrannising over man’s reason and understanding, especially when it is done, not by the Scripture, but by pretence of learning, and more judgment than that of other men.