651. Reason itself offers an additional guarantee that the Lord cannot do evil to anyone, and consequently cannot impute evil to him either; for He is love itself, mercy itself, and so good itself, and these are attributes of His Divine essence. To attribute evil, or anything to do with evil, to the Lord would be to attribute to Him something contrary to His Divine essence, and so a contradiction. This would be as unspeakable as linking the Lord and the devil, or heaven and hell. Yet between these 'there is a great gulf fixed, so that those who wish to pass from here to there cannot, neither can any pass from there to here' (Luke 16:26). Even an angel of heaven is incapable of doing evil to anyone, because the essence of good is put into him by the Lord; and in the opposite case a spirit in hell cannot do anything but evil to another, because of the evil nature put into him by the devil. The essence or nature, which anyone has made his own in the world, cannot be changed after death.
[2] Pray consider this point. What sort of Lord would He be, if He looked in anger on the wicked, but leniently on the good (the wicked number hundreds of millions, and so do the good); and if the Lord were to save one party by His grace and damn the other in revenge, looking on the two groups with such a different gaze, gently and mildly in one case and sternly and unyieldingly in the other? What would this make the Lord God? Everyone who has been taught by sermons in church knows that all good which is essentially good is from God, and on the other hand that all evil which is essentially evil is from the devil. So if a person were to receive both good and evil, good from the Lord, and evil from the devil, in both cases in the will, would he not become neither cold nor hot, but lukewarm, to be spat out, as the Lord's words have it in Revelation (3:15, 16)?
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