What damned rhetoric and subtle calumny is this? God, I said, might command a thing openly, and yet hinder the doing of it, without injustice; but if a man should command a thing to be done, and then plot secretly the hinderance of the same, and punish for the not doing it, it were injustice. This it is which the Bishop apprehends as an imputation of falsehood to God Almighty. And perhaps if the death of a sinner were, as he thinks, an eternal life in extreme misery, a man might as far as Job hath done, expostulate with God Almighty; not accusing him of injustice, because whatsoever he doth is therefore just because done by him; but of little tenderness and love to mankind. And this expostulation will be equally just or unjust, whether the necessity of all things be granted or denied. For it is manifest that God could have made man impeccable, and can now preserve him from sin, or forgive him if he please; and therefore, if he please not, the expostulation is as reasonable in the cases of _liberty_ as of _necessity_. NO. XI. [Sidenote: The Bishop’s reply.] _J. D._ “Fourthly, if either the decree of God, or the foreknowledge of God, or the influence of the stars, or the concatenation of causes, or the physical or moral efficacy of objects, or the last dictate of the understanding, do take away true liberty, then Adam before his fall had no true liberty. For he was subjected to the same decrees, the same prescience, the same constellations, the same causes, the same objects, the same dictates of the understanding. But, _quicquid ostendes mihi sic, incredulus odi_; the greatest opposers of our liberty, are as earnest maintainers of the liberty of Adam. Therefore none of these supposed impediments take away true liberty.” _T. H._ The fourth argument is to this effect: “If the decree of God, or his foreknowledge, or the influence of the stars, or the concatenation of causes, or the physical or moral efficacy of causes, or the last dictate of the understanding, or whatsoever it be, do take away true liberty, then Adam before his fall had no true liberty. _Quicquid ostendes mihi sic, incredulus odi._” That which I say necessitateth and determineth every action, (that he may no longer doubt of my meaning), is the sum of all those things, which being now existent, conduce and concur to the production of that action hereafter, whereof if any one thing now were wanting, the effect could not be produced. This concourse of causes, whereof every one is determined to be such as it is by a like concourse of former causes, may well be called (in respect they were all set and ordered by the eternal cause of all things, God Almighty) the decree of God. But that the foreknowledge of God should be a cause of any thing, cannot be truly said; seeing foreknowledge is knowledge, and knowledge dependeth on the existence of the things known, and not they on it.