as ancient as the world? that they have, in fact, been going on for thousands of weary years, and for aught you or I can tell, and as Mr. Newman seems to think probable, for millions of years?  Does not a pestilence or a famine send thousands of the guilty and the innocent alike—­nay, thousands of those who know not their right hand from their left—­to one common destruction?  Does not God (if you suppose it his doing) swallow up whole cities by earthquake, or overwhelm them with volcanic fires?  I say, is there any difference between the cases, except that the victims are very rarely so wicked as the Canaanites are said to have been, and that God in the one case himself does the very things which he commissions men to do in the other?  Now, if the thing be wrong, I, for one, shall never think it less wrong to do it one’s self than to do it by proxy.”

“But,” said Fellowes, rather warmly, for he felt rather restive at this part of Harrington’s discourse, “it is absurd to compare such sovereign acts of inexplicable will on the part of God with his command to a being so constituted as man to perform them.”

“Absurd be it,” said Harrington, “only be so kind as to show it to be so, instead of saying so.  I maintain that the one class of facts are just as ‘inexplicable,’ as you call it, as the other, and only appear otherwise because, in the one case, we daily see them, have become accustomed to them and, what is more than all, cannot deny them,—­which last we can so promptly do in the other case; for Moses is not here to contradict us.  But I rather think, that a being constituted morally and intellectually like us, who had never known any but a world of happiness, would just as promptly deny that God could ever perform such feats as are daily performed in this world!  I repeat, that, if for some reasons (’inexplicable,’ I grant you) God does not mind doing such things, he is not likely to hesitate to enjoin them; for reasons perhaps equally inexplicable.  I say perhaps; for, as I compare such an event as the earthquake in Lisbon, or the plague in London, with the extermination of the Canaanites, I solemnly assure you that I find a greater difficulty, as far as my ‘intuitions’ go, in supposing the former event to have been effected by a divine agency than the latter.  If we take the Scripture history, we must at least allow that the race thus doomed had long tried the patience of Heaven by their flagrant impiety and unnatural vices; that they had become a centre and a source (as we sometimes see collections of men to be) of moral pestilence, in the vicinage of which it was unsafe for men to dwell; that, as the Scriptures say (whether truly or falsely, I do not inquire), they had, filled up the measure of their iniquities.’  Let this be supposed as fictitious as you please, still the whole proceeding is represented as a solemn judicial one; and supposing the events to have occurred just as they are narrated, it positively seems to me much