II. To the Initial Arguments

71. As to the first argument [n.4] the answer is plain from the first article [nn.29-30].

72. As to the second [n.5], the proof is only about God’s absolute power, and this was conceded in the second main article [n.39].

73. But if you argue that God can, of his ordained power, remit sin without a penalty, just as also can an irate man - I reply: the remission of sin is not by change of God’s will, because his will, both in itself and in the act of willing, both absolute and insofar as it focuses on the object, is uniform, and consequently, if God in eternity wills someone to be punished for a certain time, he wills him always to be punished for that time, unless something in creatures changes. But it is not so with the will of an irate man, which changes as to act of willing and un-willing.

74. To the third [n.7], about the penitence of the damned, I say as before [n.42], that they do not truly repent, because neither do they ‘hold a penalty’, since it is not there voluntary but a murmuring back. And as to what is said about Judas [n.8], I reply that not just any act of being penitent suffices for deletion of sin (as will be plain from the following question [n.127]), but the act must be ordered, and ordered especially by the circumstance of the end, which is first among the circumstances of a moral act. And Judas was not penitent with that circumstance, or for love of God.

75. As to the last [n.9], it will in the following question [n.145] be plain in a way what act of being penitent is a disposition previous to deletion of sin, and what act is required formally in which sin is deleted. And this second act is as good as the sin is bad, because the malice of a sin consists in turning away from the end; therefore the good that brings one back consists in turning to the end; and thus the act of turning to the end as perfectly turns one to God as the act of sin turns one away. And just as in this second act there is not really a goodness intensively infinite, so there is not in the act of sin a malice intensively infinite. For malice is not greater than the good that it deprives; and only what is of a nature to be in the act deprives the act of good; but in the act, since it is something finite, only a finite good is of a nature to be present. There is precisely infinity, therefore, and malice in sin and goodness in the opposite act because of the infinity of the object from which sin turns away and to which a good act turns back. And this in the act is only a participated infinity, or rather an infinity in speech, because of the infinity real and simply in the object itself.