He acts most freely, and does nothing without a perfect knowledge both of the thing and all its consequences. And it is not enough to say, that God has made himself a law to concur with the wills and resolutions of men; for, beside the strangeness of his having made such a law, of which He must have known the consequences, the chief difficulty is, that it seems the evil will itself could not exist without some concurrence, and even predetermination on his part, which contributes to excite this will in man, or any other reasonable being. For an action, though evil, is not the less dependent upon God. Whence it might be inferred, finally, that God does all things without distinction, the good and the evil; unless we admit two principles, with the Manicheans.

"But even if God only concurred with a general concurrence, it is enough, it may be said, to render Him a moral cause of evil, that nothing happens without his permission. And, to say nothing of the fall of angels, He knows all that will happen, if He places man in such and such circumstances after He has created him, and still He does not forbear to place him in them. Man is exposed to temptations, to which it is known that he will yield, and thereby be the cause of frightful evils; that by this fall the whole human race will be infected, and put under a kind of necessity of sinning, which has been called Original Sin; that the world will hereby be brought into a strange confusion; that by this means sickness and death will be introduced, with a thousand other calamities, which affect both the good and the evil; that wickedness will reign, and virtue be oppressed

here below; and that thus there will almost seem to be no providence. But it is much worse, when we consider the life to come; since only a small number of men will be saved, and all the rest will perish eternally. Besides, these men, destined to salvation, will have been drawn from the corrupted mass by a choice without reason, whether we say that God had regard to their future good actions, their faith, or their works; or it is affirmed that He chose to give them these good qualities, because he had predestined them to salvation. For though it is said, in the more mitigated systems, that God has been willing to save all men; and is allowed in those more generally received, that He made his Son to assume human nature, to expiate their sins, so that all who believe in Him with a lively and lasting faith will be saved; it still remains true that this lively faith is a gift of God; that we are dead to all good works, and that it needs preventing grace to excite our will. And whether election be the cause or consequence of the design of God, to give faith, it still remains true that He gives faith or salvation to whomsoever He pleases, without there appearing to be any reason for his choice, which only falls upon a very small number of men. So that it is a terrible judgment, that God, having given his only-begotten Son for the whole human race, and being the only Author and Master of the salvation of men, notwithstanding saves so few, and leaves all the rest to the Devil, his enemy, who torments them for ever, and makes them curse their Creator, although they were all created to show forth His goodness, justice, and other perfections.

And this result is the more frightful, since all these men are miserable through eternity, only because God exposed their parents to a temptation which He knew they would not resist; and that this sin is inherent and imputed to men before their will has part in it; that this hereditary vice determines their wills to commit actual sins, and a multitude of men, infants and adults, who have never heard of Jesus Christ, die before receiving the help that is needful to rescue them from this gulf of sin, and are condemned to be for ever rebels against God, and engulfed in horrible misery, with the most wicked of all creatures; although in reality these men have not been more wicked than others, and perhaps some of them less guilty than a part of the elect, who have been saved by a grace irrespective of character, and enjoy thereby an eternal felicity, which they never deserved."

Such are the serious difficulties which appear to lie against the scheme of Providence, as experience opens it before us; or as deducible, in the judgment of many theologians, from the statements of the Christian revelation. The first main subject to which they refer is the creation of free agents, with the foresight, or even the fore-appointment of their fall, and of all its fatal consequences of misery and ruin.

The solution of this first difficulty, which Leibnitz has proposed, is of the following nature. The wisdom and goodness of God require that out of all possible worlds or systems of Providence He should choose the best. But the essential truth of things implies that a

world into which moral evil enters, and enters widely, is really best on the whole, since a greater good results from its permission. Therefore the wisdom of God requires that He should permit the entrance of evil, and forbids that exercise of Omnipotence by which alone it could have been averted. This permission is not the same with direct causation, since evil, from its very nature, can have no other than a deficient cause. It is also free from all moral blame, because its real motive is the purpose of securing a greater good, than would be otherwise possible to be achieved.

So far as this theory recognises the perfect wisdom of God's providence, it commends itself instinctively to the natural conscience. But the main difficulty remains untouched-how a world in which sin and sorrow have made such immense ravages can really be the best of all possible worlds. What is that greater good, for the sake of which innumerable beings, capable of immortal happiness, are exposed to temptation, sunk in the depths of sin, and consigned to a gulf of eternal misery? This greater good must have respect, either to the glory of God or the happiness of creation. But is it not more glorious for the Divine goodness to delight in sustaining the universe in unmingled and perfect bliss, than to have the hosannahs of praise and joy mingled with the smoke of perpetual torment, and the wail of ceaseless despair? And is not the same alternative, while it would reflect more brightly the glory of the Divine goodness, equally conducive to the fullest happiness of all creation? The antithesis, then, remains in

its full force and perplexity. You say that the present world is the best possible, because only such could proceed from a Being infinitely good and wise. We affirm, the objector may retort, that it is not the best possible, because, without perplexing ourselves with subtle inquiries, or losing ourselves in the infinite, we can conceive one plainly more conducive to the Divine glory, and to the happiness of creation. That world so clearly to be preferred is one over which moral evil should never be suffered to cast its dark and hateful shadows. It is one where the Almighty, by His sovereign power, should at once unveil to countless numbers of sinless and happy spirits all those glorious perfections, which now only a few of them attain to perceive and enjoy, after a long and perilous course of probation, wherein multitudes of their fellow-creatures are sunk and stranded for ever.

The only way in which this objection can be parried is by an intermediate hypothesis of the following character. We may conceive that it is competent to the Divine Power to sustain all moral agents in a state of purity and sinless perfection, but not to endow them, in this case, with all the wisdom and holiness, or the comprehension of the Divine goodness, which results from the permitted entrance and continuance of sin. It may thus be urged that the higher bliss of the redeemed, and the fuller display of the Divine attributes, in their depths of holy justice and heights of victorious grace, more than compensate for those mournful and terrible. results which flow from the actual permission of moral evil.