Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/297

We have now seen how the liberty granted to men and angels, with the faculty of choosing between good and evil which accompanies it, and constitutes its imperfection and its danger, is not only in accordance with the justice of God, but is likewise expedient. We have also seen how the exercise of this liberty, thus constituted, produced evil and sin, and how sin profoundly altered the order which God established in creation, and changed the perfect manner of being which all creatures received from God. Going still farther, after having given an account of the disorder into which the divine work was thus thrown, we proposed to demonstrate, and we believe that we have succeeded in so doing, that if angels and men were endowed with free will, and permitted to make use of this formidable faculty in order to draw evil out of good, and corrupt all things, the ones by their revolt and the others by their disobedience, and both by sin; that if God permitted them this disturbing faculty of liberty, he did so because he had reserved for himself the power to neutralize this disturbing influence, and to draw good out of evil, and order out of disorder. By this means, God fully restored things to a more perfect state of harmony and agreement than that destroyed by the revolted angels and the sins of men. In order to render the existence of evil impossible, it would have been necessary to suppress angelical and human liberty, which