It is plain, that, in accordance with our primitive “moral intuitions” (if we have any), we should hold him who had the power to prevent a wrong, and did not use it, as a participator and accomplice in the crime he did not prevent.  Applying, therefore, the principles of Mr. Newman, I must refuse to acknowledge such conduct on the part of the Divine Being, and to say, that such things are not done by him.  If I may trust my whisper of him, derived from analogous moral qualities in myself, I must believe that an administration which so ruthlessly permits these things is not his work; but that his power, wisdom, and goodness have been thwarted, baffled, and overmastered by some “omnipotent devil,” to use Mr. Newman’s expression; if it be, then that whisper of him cannot be trusted:  the heathen was right, “Sunt superis sua jura.”  In other words, I feel that I must become an Atheist, a Pantheist, a Manichaean, or—­what I am—­a sceptic.

All these perplexities are increased when I trace them up to that profound mystery in which they all originate,—­I mean the permission of physical and moral evil.  Either evil could have been prevented or not; if it could, its immense and horrible prevalence is at war with the intuition already referred to; if it could not, who shall prove it?  I am no more able to contradict the intuitions of the intellect than those of the conscience; and if any thing can be called a contradiction of the former, it is to be told that a Being of infinite power, wisdom, and beneficence could not construct a world without an immensity of evil in it; no reason being assignable or even imaginable for such a proposition, except the fact that such a world has not been created!  I am therefore compelled to doubt, whether such a universe be really the fabrication of such a Being.  It is impossible to express my astonishment at the ease with which Mr. Newman disposes of the difficulties connected with the origin and perpetuation of physical and moral evil.  His arguments are just two of the most hackneyed commonplaces with which metaphysicians have attempted to evade these stupendous difficulties; and it is not too much to say, that there never was a man who was not resolved that his theory must stand, who pretended to attach any importance to them.  They are most gratuitously assumed, and even then are most trivial alleviations; a mere plaster of brown paper for a deep-seated cancer.

I certainly know of no other man who has stood so unabashed in front of these awful forms.  One almost envies him the truly childlike faith with which he waves his hand to these Alps, and says, “Be ye removed, and east into the sea”; but the feeling is exchanged for another, when he seems to rub his eyes, and exclaim, “Presto, they are gone sure enough!” while you still feel that you stand far within the circumference of their awful shadows.