rsion: it amounts merely to a denial, a limitation, a corruption of
good, not to the dignity of its abstract antagonism. Familiarly, but
fallaciously, we talk of the evil principle, the contradictory to good:
we might as well talk of the nosologic principle, the contradictory to
health; or the darkness principle, the contradictory to light. They are
contraries, but not contradictories: they have no positive, but only a
relative existence. Good and evil are verily foes, but originally there
was one cemented friendship: slender beginnings consequent on a
creation, began to cause the breach: the civil war arose out of a state
of primitive peace: images betray us into errors, or I might add with a
protest against the risk of being misinterpreted, that like brothers
turned to a deadly hate, they nevertheless sprang not originally out of
two hostile and opposite hemispheres, but from one paternal hearth. Not,
however, in any sense that God is the author of evil; but that God's
workmanship, the finite creature, needfully perverted good.

The origin of evil--that is, its birth--is a term true and clear:
original evil--that is, giving it no birth but an antedate to all
created things, suffering it to run parallel with God and good from all
eternity--this is a term false and misty. The probability that good
would be warped, and grow deteriorate; that wisdom would be dwindled
down into less and less wisdom, or foolishness; and power degenerated
more and more towards imbecility; must arise, directly a creature should
spring out of the Creator; and that, let astronomy or geology name any
date they will: Adam is a definite date; perhaps also the first
day's--or period's--work: but the Beginning of Creation is undated. It
would then, under this impression of the necessary defalcation of the
creature from the strict straight line, be rational to look for
deviations: it would be rational to presuppose that God--just, and good,
and pure, and wise--should righteously be able to "charge his angels
with folly," should verily declare that "the heavens are not pure in his
sight."

Further; it would be a possible chance (which considerations soon
succeeding would render even probable) that for a wise humiliation of
the reasoning creature, and a just exaltation of the only Source of life
and light and all things, one or more of such first created beings, or
angels, should be suffered to fall, possibly from the vastest height,
and at first by t