ents, whether as regards their own guilt, or the mischief it
caused to others. Those reasoners deny that the creation of man's will
and the endowing it with liberty explains anything; they hold that the
creation of a mind whose will is to do evil, amounts to the same thing,
and belongs to the same class, with the creation of matter whose nature
is to give pain and misery. But this position, which involves
the doctrine of necessity, must, at the very least, admit of one
modification. Where no human agency whatever is interposed, and the
calamity comes without any one being to blame for it, the mischief seems
a step, and a large step, nearer the creative or the superintending
cause, because it is, as far as men go, altogether inevitable. The main
tendency of the argument, therefore, is confined to physical evil; and
this has always been found the most difficult to account for, that is to
reconcile with the government of a perfectly good and powerful Being.
It would indeed be very easily explained, and the reconcilement would be
readily made, if we were at liberty to suppose matter independent in
its existence, and in certain qualities, of the divine control; but this
would be to suppose the Deity's power limited and imperfect, which is
just one horn of the Epicurean dilemma, _"Aut vult et non potest;"_ and
in assuming this, we do not so much beg the question as wholly give it
up and admit we cannot solve the difficulty. Yet obvious as this is, we
shall presently see that the reasoners who have undertaken the solution,
and especially King and Law, under such phrases as "the nature of
things," and "the laws of the material universe," have been constantly,
through the whole argument, guilty of this _petitio principii_ (begging
the question), or rather this abandonment of the whole question, and
never more so than at the very moment when they complacently plumed
themselves upon having overcome the difficulty.

Having premised these observations for the purpose of clearing the
ground and avoiding confusion in the argument, we may now consider that
Archbishop King's theory is in both its parts; for there are in truth
two distinct explanations, the one resembling an argument _a priori_,
the other an argument _a posteriori_. It is, however, not a little
remarkable that Bishop Law, in the admirable abstract or analysis which
he gives of the Archbishop's treatise at the end of his preface, begins
with the second branch, omitting all