Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/155

erty amounts to the same thing as bestowing the right to alter the immaculate beauty of creation. And as this spotless beauty consists in the order and harmony of the universe, so to confer the faculty of disturbing this order is the same thing as to grant the power to substitute disorder for order, perturbation for harmony, and evil for good.

This right, even restrained by the limits we have indicated, is so exorbitant, and this faculty is so monstrous, that God would never have consented to its exercise, had he not been certain of making it an instrument for the accomplishment of his designs, and of controlling the disasters it produces by his infinite power.

The principal reason why man should be permitted to convert order into disorder, harmony into perturbation, and good into evil, is found in the power of God to change disorder into order, perturbation into harmony, and evil into good. If we do not admit this sovereign power in God, it would be logically necessary to deprive the creature of the faculty of liberty, or to deny the divine intelligence and omnipotence.

If God permits sin, which is the sovereign evil and disorder, it is because sin, far from restraining the exercise of his justice and mercy, serves to exhibit new manifestations of those attributes. If the rebellious sinner had not existed, the divine justice and mercy would not thereby have been suppressed; but only one of their especial manifestations would no longer exist—that which is peculiarly applied to rebellious sinners.

As the supreme good of intelligent and free beings consists in their union with God, so God has, in his infinite goodness, and by a free act of his ineffable mercy, determined that they should be united to him not only