less difficult to suppose them to harmonize with the character of a just and even beneficent being, than those wholesale butcheries which have desolated the world, in every hour of its long history, without any discrimination whatever of innocence or guilty; which, if they have inflicted unspeakable miseries on the immediate victims, have produced probably as much or more in the agony of the myriad myriads of hearts which have bled or broken in unavailing sorrow over the sufferings they could not relieve.  Such things (I speak now only of what man has not in any sense inflicted) are, in your view, as undeniably the work of God as is the extermination of the Canaanites according to the Bible.  Why, if God does not mind doing such things, are we to suppose that he minds on some occasions ordering them to be done; unless we suppose that man—­delicate creature!—­has more refined intuitions of right and wrong, and knows better what they are, than God himself?  Now, Mr. Newman and you affirm, that to suppose God should have enjoined the destruction of the Canaanites is a contradiction of our moral intuitions; and that for this and similar reasons you cannot believe the Bible to be the word of God.  I answer, that the things I have mentioned are in still more glaring contradiction to such ‘intuitions’; than which none appears to me more clear than this,—­that the morally innocent ought not to suffer; and I therefore doubt whether the above phenomena are the work of God.  I must refuse, on the very same principle on which Mr. Newman disallows the Bible to be a true revelation of such a Being, to allow this universe to be so.  In equally glaring inconsistency is the entire administration of this lower world with what appears to me a first principle of moral rectitude,—­namely, that he who suffers a wrong to be inflicted on another, when he can prevent it, is responsible for the wrong itself.  The whole world is full of such instances.”

“Ay,” said Fellowes, eagerly, “we ought to prevent a wrong, provided we have the right as well as the power to interfere.”

“I am supposing that we have the right as well as the power; as, for example, to prevent a man from murdering his neighbor, or a thief from entering his dwelling.  There are, no doubt, many acts which, from our very limited right, we should have no business to prevent; as, for example, to prevent a man from getting tipsy at his own table with his own wine.  But no such limitation can apply to Him who is supposed to be the Absolute Monarch of the universe; and yet He (according to your view) notoriously does not interpose to prevent the daily commission of the most heinous wrongs and cruelties under which the earth has groaned, and hearts have been breaking, for thousands of years.  You will say, perhaps, that in all such instances we must believe that there are some reasons for His conduct, though we cannot guess what they are.  Ah! my friend, if you come to believing, you may believe also that the difficulties involved in the Scriptural representations of the Divine character and proceedings are susceptible of a similar solution.  If you come to believing, I think the Christian can believe as well as you, and rather more consistently.  But let me proceed.”  He then read on.