Leibnitz felt that nothing could be said to these objections, but nevertheless made great books, in which he did not even understand himself.

Lucullus, in good health, partaking of a good dinner with his friends and his mistress in the hall of Apollo, may jocosely deny the existence of evil; but let him put his head out of the window and he will behold wretches in abundance; let him be seized with a fever, and he will be one himself.

I do not like to quote; it is ordinarily a thorny proceeding. What precedes and what follows the passage quoted is too frequently neglected; and thus a thousand objections may arise. I must notwithstanding quote Lactantius, one of the fathers, who, in the thirteenth chapter on the anger of God, makes Epicurus speak as follows:- -"God can either take away evil from the world and will not; or being willing to do so, cannot; or he neither can nor will; or lastly, he is both able and willing. If he is willing to remove evil and cannot, then is he not omnipotent. If he can, but will not remove it, then is he not benevolent; if he is neither able nor willing, then is he neither powerful nor benevolent lastly, if both able and willing to nnihilate evil, how does it exist ?"

The argument is weighty, and Lactantius replies to it very poorly, by saying that God wills evil, but has given us wisdom to secure the good. It must be confessed, that this answer is very weak in comparison with the objection; for it implies that God could bestow wisdom only by allowing evil-a pleasant wisdom truly! The origin of evil has always been an abyss, the depth of which no one has been able to sound. It was this difficulty which reduced so many ancient philosophers and legislators to have recourse to two principles-the one good, the other wicked. Typhon was the evil principle among the Egyptians; Arimanes, among the Persians. The Manicheans, it is said, adopted this theory; but as these people have never spoken either of a good or of a bad principle, we have nothing to prove it but the assertion.

Among the absurdities abounding in this world, and

which may be placed among the number of our evils, that is not the least which presumes the existence of two all-powerful beings, combatting which shall prevail most in this world, and making a treaty like the two physicians in Molière:-" Allow me the emetic, and I resign to you the lancet."

Basilides pretended, with the platonists of the first century of the church, that God gave the making of our world to his inferior angels and these, being inexpert, have constructed it as we perceive. This theological fable is laid prostrate by the overwhelming objection, that it is not in the nature of a deity all-powerful and all-wise to entrust the construction of a world to incompetent architects.

Simon, who felt the force of this objection, obviates it by saying, that the angel who presided over the workmen is damned for having done his business so slovenly; but the roasting of this angel amends nothing,

The adventure of Pandora among the Greeks scarcely meets the objection better, The box in which every evil is inclosed, and at the bottom of which remains hope, is indeed a charming allegory; but this Pandora was made by Vulcan, only to avenge himself of Prometheus, who had stolen fire to inform a man of clay.

The Indians have succeeded no better. God having created man, gave him a drug which would ensure him permanent health of body. The man loaded his ass with the drug, and the ass being thirsty, the serpent directed him to a fountain, and while the ass was drinking, purloined the drug.

Am

The Syrians pretended, that man and woman having been created in the fourth heaven, they resolved to eat a cake in lieu of ambrosia, their natural food. brosia exhaled by the pores; but after eating cake, they were obliged to relieve themselves in the usual manner. The man and the woman requested an angel to direct them to a water-closet. Behold, said the angel, that petty globe which is almost of no size at all; it is situated about sixty millions of leagues from this

place, and is the quickly as you can.

privy of the universe-go there as The man and woman obeyed the angel and came here, where they have ever since remained since which time the world has been what we now find it.

The Syrians will eternally be asked, why God allowed. man to eat the cake, and experience such a crowd of formidable ills?

I pass with speed from the fourth heaven to lord Bolingbroke. This writer, who doubtless was a great genius, gave to the celebrated Pope his plan of all for the best,' as it is found word for word in the posthumous works of lord Bolingbroke, and recorded by lord Shaftesbury in his Characteristics. Read in Shaftesbury's chapter of the Moralists, the following passage:

"Much may be replied to these complaints of the defects of nature-How came it so powerless and defective from the hands of a perfect Being ?-But I deny that it is defective. Beauty is the result of contrast, and universal concord springs out of a perpetual conflict.... It is necessary that everything be sacrificed to other things-vegetables to animals, and animals to the earth The laws of the central power of gravitation, which give to the celestial bodies their weight and motion, are not to be deranged in consideration of a pitiful animal, who, protected as he is by the same laws, will soon be reduced to dust".

Bolingbroke, Shaftesbury, and Pope their working artisan, resolve the general question no better than the rest. Their 'all for the best' says no more than that all is governed by immutable laws; and who did not know that? We learn nothing when we remark, after the manner of little children, that flies are created to be eaten by spiders, spiders by swallows, swallows by hawks, hawks by eagles, eagles by men, men by one another to afford food to worms; and at last, at the rate of about a thousand to one, to be the prey of devils everlastingly. There is a constant and regular order established among animals of all kinds-an universal order. When a stone is formed in my bladder, the mechanical pro

cess is admirable: sandy particles pass by small degrees into my blood; they are filtered by the reins; and passing the urethra, deposit themselves in my bladder; where, uniting agreeably to the Newtonian attraction, a stone is formed which gradually increases, and I suffer pains a thousand times worse than death by the finest arrangement in the world. A surgeon, perfect in the art of Tubal-cain, thrusts into me a sharp instrument; and cutting into the perineum, seizes the stone with his pincers, which breaks during the endeavours, by the necessary laws of mechanism; and owing to the same mechanism, I die in frightful torments. All this is' for the best,' being the evident result of unalterable physical principles, agreeably to which I know as well as you that I perish.

If we were insensitive, there would be nothing to say against this system of physics; but this is not the point on which we treat. We ask, if there are not physical evils, and whence do they originate? There is no absolute evil, says Pope in his Essay on Man; or if there are particular evils, they compose a general good.

It is a singular general good which is composed of the stone, and the gout,-of all sorts of crimes and sufferings, and of death and damnation.

The fall of man is our plaister for all these particular maladies of body and soul, which you call "the general health;" but Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke have attacked original sin. Pope says nothing about it; but it is clear that their system saps the foundations of the christian religion, and explains nothing at all.

In the mean time, this system has been since approved by many theologians, who willingly embrace contradictions. Be it so; we ought to leave to everybody the privilege of reasoning in their own way upon the deluge of ills which overwhelms us. It would be as reasonable to prevent incurable patients from eating what they please. "God," says Pope, "beholds, with an equal eye, a hero perish or a sparrow fall; the destruction of an atom, or the ruin of a thousand

planets; the bursting of a bubble, or the dissolution of a world."

This, I must confess, is a pleasant consolation. Who does not find a comfort in the declaration of lord Shaftesbury, who asserts, "that God will not derange his general system for so miserable an animal as man?" It must be confessed at least, that this pitiful creature has a right to cry out humbly, and to endeavour, while bemoaning himself, to understand why these eternal laws do not comprehend the good of every individual.

This system of all for the best,' represents the Author of Nature as a powerful and malevolent monarch, who cares not for the destruction of four or five hundred thousand men, nor of the many more who in consequence spend the rest of their days in penury and tears, provided that he succeeds in his designs.

Far therefore from the doctrine-that this is the best of all possible worlds-being consolatory, it is a hopeless one to the philosophers who embrace it. The question of good and evil remains in remediless chaos for those who seek to fathom it in reality.

It is a

mere mental sport to the disputants, who are captives that play with their chains. As to unreasoning people, they resemble the fish which are transported from a river to a reservoir, with no more suspicion that they are to be eaten during the approaching Lent, than we have ourselves of the facts which originate our destiny.

Let us place at the end of every chapter of metaphysics, the two letters used by the Roman judges when they did not understand a pleading, L. Ñ. non liquet-it is not clear. Let us above all silence the knaves who, overloaded like ourselves with the weight of human calamities, add the mischief of their calumny: let us refute their execrable imposture, by having recourse to faith and providence.

Some reasoners are of opinion, that it agrees not with the nature of the Great Being of beings, for things to be otherwise than they are. It is a rough system, and I am too ignorant to venture to examine it.