15. Nor is this all. We are told that the devils “are still permitted by God to occupy a place in creation to which they belong, and in the relations which they were intended to have with humankind, relations of which they make a most pernicious misuse.” But could God be unaware of the misuse that they would make of the liberty God grants to them? If God foresaw this misuse of their liberty, why did God grant them such liberty? Are we to believe that being fully aware of what God was doing, God abandoned God’s creatures beforehand to the mercy of devils, knowing, in virtue of God’s infinite prescience, that those creatures in their weakness and inexperience would succumb to the temptings of the devils and incur their doom? Must God not have foreknown that their own weakness would be quite enough for God’s creatures to have to struggle against, without God allowing them to be incited to the commission of evil by a foreign enemy, and one that would be all the more dangerous because he or she is invisible? Such an abandonment would be cruel enough, even if the chastisement to which it led were only temporary, and if the wrong-doers could obtain their release by repenting and making reparation for their misdeeds. But, no; they are condemned to all eternity; their repentance, their return to right sentiments, their remorse, and their regrets, all are absolutely unavailing!
According to this doctrine, demons, or devils, are agents specially predestined to recruit souls for Hell, and this, with the permission of God, who foreknew in creating these souls the doom which awaited them. What would be thought, upon the Earth, of a judge who should resort to such an expedient for filling the prisons? And does not such a doctrine give a strange idea of the Divinity of a God whose essential attributes are infinite justice and infinite goodness? And it is in the name of Jesus Christ, of him whose teachings breathed only love, charity, and forgiveness that such a doctrine is proclaimed! There was a time when such an anomaly might pass unnoticed; the contradiction of such a doctrine with the attributes of the Divinity was not understood, and, consequently, not felt as such; men and women, bowed beneath the yoke of despotism, submitted blindly, abdicating their reason; but, at the present day, the era of emancipation has come; the human race has acquired the notion of justice, demanding justice during life and after death; and therefore replies, when this doctrine is set before them, “It is not true, it cannot be true, or God would not be God!”
