clined to conceive the
possibility of limiting, by the course of the argument upon evil, one
alternative of which is assumed to raise an exception. But admitting on
account of the question under discussion, that we have only a right to
say that power and skill are prodigiously great, though possibly not
boundless, they are plainly shown in the phenomena of the universe to
be the attributes of a Being, who, if evil-disposed, could have made the
monuments of Ill upon a scale resembling those of Power and Skill; so
that if those things which seem to us evil be really the result of a
mischievous design in such a Being, we cannot comprehend why they are
upon so entirely different a scale. This is a strong presumption from
the facts that we are wrong in imputing those appearances to such a
disposition. If so, what seems evil must needs be capable of some other
explanation consistent with divine goodness--that is to say, would not
prove to be evil at all if we knew the whole of those facts.

But it is necessary to proceed a step further, especially with a view
to the fundamental position now contended for, the extending to the
question of Benevolence the same principles which we apply to that of
Intelligence. The evil which exists, or that which we suppose to be
evil, not only is of a kind and a magnitude requiring inconceivably less
power and less skill than the admitted good of the creation--it also
bears a very small proportion in amount; quite as small a proportion
as the cases of unknown or undiscoverable design bear to those
of acknowledged and proved contrivance. Generally speaking, the
preservation and the happiness of sensitive creatures appears to be
the great object of creative exertion and conservative providence. The
expanding of our faculties, both bodily and mentally, is accompanied
with pleasure; the exercise of those powers is almost always attended
with gratification; all labor so acts as to make rest peculiarly
delicious; much of labor is enjoyment; the gratification of those
appetites by which both the individual is preserved and the race is
continued, is highly pleasurable to all animals; and it must be observed
that instead of being attracted by grateful sensations to do anything
requisite for our good or even our existence, we might have been just as
certainly urged by the feeling of pain, or the dread of it, which is a
kind of suffering in itself. Nature, then, resembles the law-giver
who, to make his s