f this difficulty, he
at length comes to this conclusion, that life is a free gift, which we
had no right to exact, and which the Deity lay under no necessity to
grant, and therefore we must take it with the conditions annexed (p.
210); which is undeniably true, but is excluding the discussion and
not answering the question proposed. Nor must it be forgotten that
some reasoners deal strangely with the facts. Thus Derham, in his
_Physico-Theology_, explaining the use of poison in snakes, first
desires us to bear in mind that many venomous ones are of use
medicinally in stubborn diseases, which is not true, and if it were,
would prove nothing, unless the venom, not the flesh, were proved to be
medicinal; and then says, they are "scourges upon ungrateful and sinful
men;" adding the truly astounding absurdity, "that the nations which
know not God are the most annoyed with noxious reptiles and other
pernicious creatures." (Book ix. c. I); which if it were true would
raise a double difficulty, by showing that one people was scourged
because another had neglected to preach the gospel among them. Dr. J.
Burnett, too, accounts for animals being suffered to be killed as food
for man, by affirming that they thereby gain all the care which man is
thus led to bestow upon them, and so are, on the whole, the better for
being eaten. (Boyle Lecture, II. 207). But the most singular error has
perhaps been fallen into by Dr. Sherlock, and the most, unhappy--which
yet Bishop Law has cited as a sufficient answer to the objection
respecting death: "It is a great instrument of government, and makes men
afraid of committing such villanies as the laws of their country have
made capital." (Note 34). So that the greatest error in the criminal
legislation of all countries forms part of the divine providence, and
man has at length discovered, by the light of reason, the folly and
the wickedness of using an instrument expressly created by divine
Omniscience to be abused!

The remaining portion of King's work, filling the second volume of
Bishop Law's edition, is devoted to the explanation of Moral Evil; and
here the gratuitous assumption of the "nature of things," and the "laws
of nature," more or less pervade the whole as in the former parts of the
Inquiry.

The fundamental position of the whole is, that man having been endowed
with free will, his happiness consists in making due elections, or in
the right exercise of that free will. Five causes a