58. If the current belief about God's omnipotence was correct, so that it extended to doing evil as well as good, surely it would be possible, or rather easy, for God to lift the whole of hell up into heaven, change devils and satans into angels, and in an instant cleanse any irreligious person on earth of his sins, make him new and sanctify him, regenerate him, turn him from a son of wrath into a son of grace, that is, justify him, by the simple attribution and imputation of His Son's righteousness. But God cannot do this by His omnipotence, because it is contrary to the laws of order He has imposed on the universe, and at the same time to the laws of order imposed upon every person; for these demand that both sets should be mutually linked together. The proof of this will be demonstrated later in this book.
It would be the result of that absurd opinion and belief about God's omnipotence, that God could change any person from a goat to a sheep, and at His pleasure transfer him from His left side to His right; at His pleasure He could transform the spirits of the dragon into the angels of Michael; He could endow a person whose understanding resembled a mole's with the eagle's keen vision, in short to make a person a dove instead of a homed owl. All these things God cannot do, because they would be contrary to the laws of His order; yet all the time He wills them and endeavours to effect them. If He could do such things, He would not have allowed Adam to listen to the serpent, and pluck the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and put it in his mouth. He would not, if He could do this, have allowed Cain to kill his brother, David to number the people, Solomon to build shrines for idols, and the kings of Judah and Israel to profane the Temple, as they did so many times. Rather, if God could do this, by the redemption effected by His Son He would have saved the whole human race with no exceptions and wiped out all hell. The ancient gentiles attributed omnipotence of this sort to their gods and goddesses; this is the source of their myths, as that of Deucalion and Pyrrha, who threw stones behind their backs to make men; of Apollo turning Daphne into a laurel-bush; of Diana turning a huntsman into a stag*, of another of their deities turning the maidens of Parnassus into magpies. The current belief about the Divine omnipotence is similar, and that is the source from which so many fanatical and heretical ideas have spread to every region of the world where there is any religion.
* The Latin has 'hind', but this differs from 'stag' by only one letter.
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