powers He had bestowed, how far stronger would be the temptation to refuse consent to a further revelation, that should call upon it to abdicate its own will, and reduce itself to a temporary state of passive impotence, in order to be thereby secured against some unknown evil of which it had no present experience? Either alternative is equally untenable in the eye of calm and sober reason; while it runs counter to the whole drift and current of Divine revelation.

A tacit appeal seems made, however, in the words just quoted from one of the first of theologians, to the experience of Christian believers, as if the assumption could be easily proved by their perseverance in the service of God. But "the virtue of perseverance" in the two instances has little in common but the name. There is a provision, in the scheme of redemption, for many a partial fall, even of believers, and many stages of recovery. The argument lies really the other way. Even in the case of His own people, whom the Lord loves with a special and distinguishing love, there can be found, in the judgment of most Christians, no example of perseverance in sinless perfection. And if this were possible, as other Christians believe, in a few cases of eminent holiness, a result so rare and exceptional, under all the richer revelations of Divine grace, is rather a presumption that the gift was entirely impossible to be imparted by any act of mere power, before the grace of redemption had dawned on the night of sin and On every ground of reason and experience, we may well accept the conclusion that every provision was

sorrow.

made, by the all-wise Creator, for the continued obedience of men and angels, which was consistent with the essential laws of created being; and the expostulation addressed to the rebellious Jews is equally true in its earlier and wider application to the twofold rebellion in the earthly and the heavenly Paradise. "What could have been done more to my vineyard, that I have not done to it? Wherefore, when I looked that it should bring forth grapes, brought it forth wild grapes?" Thus God will be justified in His sayings, and be clear when He is judged. His goodness and equity will be fully cleared at the last from those dark clouds which the blasphemy of His enemies, and the dim-sighted faith of His own children, more ready to magnify His power than to apprehend the purity and perfection of His goodness, have caused to obscure the righteous Providence of the Most High.

On this view, however, that the prevention of moral evil, in created free agents, is impossible in its own nature, the original difficulty reappears in an altered form. Why did the Almighty exercise His creative power, in forming spirits with such lofty but perilous endowments, when he foresaw the fearful ruin into which multitudes would plunge themselves by their fall? Were it not better to have forborne a work so awful in its consequences, and rather to have sacrificed the possible happiness of the unfallen and the redeemed, than to purchase it by the foreseen misery and despair of a vast multitude, perhaps even a majority, of the creatures He has made?

There are many reasons which may be offered in reply to this objection, and some of which will come before us in the progress of the inquiry. But there is one which ought to be sufficient alone to silence every such doubt, and clear the Divine wisdom and goodness from the charge implicitly brought against them. For how can we conceive a more awful triumph of evil, than that its dark and hateful spectre, while yet unborn, should tie up the hands of the Almighty from the noblest exercise of His creative wisdom, and imprison His infinite riches of goodness within His own bosom ; so that matter should never exist, because it might issue in a soulless and infinite chaos, and no reasonable souls ever spring to life, to love and adore their Creator, lest the dark power of evil should seize upon them, in spite of all His perfection, and drag them down into an abyss of ruin. To deny life to infinite numbers of holy and happy beings, whom His power could create and His wisdom govern, and in whom His goodness might delight itself for ever, through the fear of the victory of evil, in the abuse of His own gifts— what were this, but for the Supremely Good to play the coward and the murderer, and thus to deny His own being, and renounce his Godhead, lest the abusers of His free bounty should suffer the just punishment of their crimes? Must not the life which refused to flow forth, through such fears as these, at once begin to stagnate in its hidden source; and evil achieve its most fatal and awful triumph, by planting its victorious standard within citadel of all perfection, and turning the pure

the

very

and infinite fountain of living waters into a dull marsh, from whence no stream of goodness should ever flow? Far must it be from the Infinitely Wise thus to veil His perfect wisdom before the mere possibilities of unborn evil, and to immolate His own glory, and the being of the whole universe, on the altar of a dark and gloomy Destiny. He is Light, and over him darkness can have no power. He is the Only Good, and must do good continually with a free delight, or renounce the primal law of His holy and all-perfect being.

From these preliminary views of the Divine nature, and the true source of evil, let us proceed to consider, in succession, some of the earliest acts of Divine Providence, that we may see more clearly the wisdom and goodness of all the counsels of the Almighty.

CHAPTER V.

ON THE CREATION AND FALL OF ANGELS.

THE first main fact of God's moral government which the word of God reveals to us is the creation of angels, and that subsequent rebellion by which multitudes of them became apostates from their original glory. It is a truth which looms dimly and awfully upon us through the mists of a past eternity. In the hour of creation, when the foundations of the earth were laid, these morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy. But no sooner was man planted in Eden, than a mysterious Tempter appears, by whose fraud he is led astray into ruin. His names in the Scripture are descriptive of a fearful power and activity of evil. He is the Adversary of God and man, the Deceiver of the nations, the God of this world, the Prince of the power of the air, and the whole world is described by one Apostle as lying in his arms. Such descriptions must import no slight degree of power, malice, and moral influence. They open before our vision a terrible gulf, in which the noblest faculties and endowments have been fatally entombed, and lend a new emphasis to the sublime apostrophe of the prophet on the king of Babylon—