Mozley: A Treatise on the Augustinian Doctrine of

238 Scholastic Theory CHAP. rx.
To the position that the Divine Will was the cause of
things that were, succeeded the further one, that it could
have caused everything that was, without a contradiction
in terms, possible. 1 And stated thus
indefinitely, this
position also was only a legitimate expansion of the idea
of the Divine Power. We evidently cannot restrict the
Divine Power to the simple causation of the existing world,
without reducing it to a cause acting itself under a neces
sity, or to a kind of fate. If we liberate the First Cause,
however, from this tie, and suppose it to act freely, causing
some effects and not others, according to its own sovereign
will and pleasure, we cannot state its Power less narrowly
than as a Power of causing anything which is, in the
nature of things, possible. But while the scholastic posi
tion was in itself legitimate, it was carried out unsoundly
and hastily.
Its maintainers advanced beyond the inde
finite ground that God could cause every thing that was
possible, to state what was possible ;
and they determined
that the Supreme Being could, had it pleased Him, have
made the whole universe more perfect than it was, both
by adding to its parts and species, and by making the
existing ones better, and not only better but faultless. The
universe was finite, and what was finite could be added to;
and the scale which ascended from this created world to
infinity had numberless places unoccupied, which the
Creator could have filled up, and successive types of being
which He could have embodied and expressed, had He so
willed, and so increased the ranks and orders of the exist
ing universe. The existing species, too, could have been
Sum. Theol. P. 1. Q. 19, Art. 6. aliquid contingat prseter ordinem
Sicut lignum impeditur a com- divinse gubernationis ; sed ex hoc
bustione per actionem aquae. ipso quod aliquid ex una parte vi-
Q. 22. Art. 2. Sicut indigestio detur exire ab ordine Divinae provicontingit
prseter ordinem virtutis dentise, quo consideratur secundum
nutritivse ex aliquo impedimento, aliquam particularem causam, neputa
ex grossitie cibi, quam necesse cesse est quod in eundem ordinem
est reducere in aliam causam, et relabatur secundum aliam causam.
sic usque ad causam primamj uni- Sum. Theol. P. 1. Q,. 103. Art. 7.
versalem. Cum igitur Deus sit
* Cum Deus omnia posse dicitur,
prima causa universalis non unius nihil rectius intelligitur quam quod
generis tantum, sed universaliter possit omnia possibilia. Sum.
totius entis, impossible est quod Theol. P. 1. Q. 25. Art. 3.