the same effect. "Most sure it is that he can do all
things possible. But are we in any degree competent judges of the bounds
of possibility?" So again under another form nature is introduced as
something different from its author, and offering limits to his
power. "It is plainly not the method of nature to obtain her ends
instantaneously." Passing over such propositions as that "_useless_ evil
is a thing never seen," (when the whole question is why the same ends
were not attained without evil), and a variety of other subordinate
assumptions contrary to the hypothesis, we may rest with this general
statement, which almost every page of Dr. Balguy's book bears out, that
the question which he has set himself to solve is anything rather than
the real one touching the Origin of Evil; and that this attempt at
a solution is as ineffectual as any of those which we have been
considering.

Is, then, the question wholly incapable of solution, which all these
learned and ingenious men have so entirely failed in solving? Must
the difficulty remain forever unsurmounted, and only be approached to
discover that it is insuperable? _Must the subject, of all others the
most interesting for us to know well, be to us always as a sealed book,
of which we can never know anything?_ From the nature of the thing--from
the question relating to the operation of a power which, to our limited
faculties, must ever be incomprehensible--there seems too much reason
for believing that nothing precise or satisfactory ever will be attained
by human reason regarding this great argument; and that the bounds
which limit our views will only be passed when we have quitted the
encumbrances of our mortal state, and are permitted to survey those
regions beyond the sphere of our present circumscribed existence. The
other branch of Natural Theology, that which investigates the evidences
of Intelligence and Design, and leads us to a clear apprehension of the
Deity's power and wisdom, is as satisfactorily cultivated as any other
department of science, rests upon the same species of proof, and affords
results as precise as they are sublime. This branch will never be
distinctly known, and will always so disappoint the inquirer as to
render the lights of Revelation peculiarly acceptable, although
even those lights leave much of it still involved in darkness--still
mysterious and obscure.[2]

Yet let us endeavor to suggest some possible explication, while we admit
tha