inclination towards folly, and from purity.  The mere idea of creatures would involve, as its great need-be, the qualifying clause that these emanations from perfection be imperfect; and that these children of purity be liable to grow unpure.  They must either be thus natured, or exist of the essence of God, that is, be other persons and phases of the Deity:  such a case was possible certainly; but, as we have already shown, not probable.  And it were possible, that, in consequence of some redemption such as we have spoken of, creatures might by ingraftation into God become so entirely part of Him—­bone of bone, and flesh of flesh, and spirit of spirit—­that an exhortation to such blest beings should reasonably run, “Be ye perfect.”  But this infinite munificence of the Godhead in redemption was not to be found among His bounties as Creator.  It might indeed arise afterwards, as setting up again the fallen creature in some safe niche of Deity:  and we now know it has arisen:  “we are complete in Him.”

But this, though relevant, is a digression.  Returning, and to produce some further argument against all creature perfectness; let us consider how rational it seems to presuppose that the mighty Maker in his boundless love should have willed to form a long chain of classes of existence more and more subordinated each to the other, each good of its kind and happy in its way, but yet all needfully more or less removed from the high standard of uncreate Perfection.  These descending links, these graduations downwards, must involve a nearer or remoter approach to evil.  Now, we must bear in mind that Evil is not a principle, but a perversion:  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.