Note 62 — Chapter XIII · THE GREAT TOL­ER­A­TION EX­ER­CISED A­MONG THE JEWS.

The doctrine of predestination is of long standing and universal; we find it in Homer. Jupiter was desirous to save the life of his son Sarpedon; but destiny had marked him for death, and Jupiter was obliged to submit. Destiny was, with the philosophers, either the necessary concatenation of causes and effects necessarily produced by nature, or that same concatenation ordained by Providence; the latter of which is most reasonable. We find the whole system of fatality or predestination, comprised in this line of Annæus Seneca: “Ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt.” It has always been acknowledged that God governs the universe by eternal, universal and immutable laws; this truth gave rise to the many unintelligible disputes concerning free-will, which had never been defined before the great philosopher Locke arose, who has proved it to be the power of acting. God bestows this power, and man, acting freely according to the eternal decrees of Providence, is one of the wheels of the great machine of the universe. Free-will has been a subject of disputation from all antiquity; but no one until of late times was ever persecuted on this subject. How horrible, how absurd is it to have imprisoned and banished on account of this dispute a Pompone d’Andilly, an Arnauld, a Nicole, a Sacy, and so many others who were the shining lights of France!