As to physical evil, Mr. Newman tells us, “Here may be sufficient to remark, that the difficulty on the Epicurean assumption, that physical case and comfort is the most valuable thing in the universe:  but that is not true even with brutes.  There is a certain perfection in the nature of each, consisting in the full development of all their powers, to which the existing order manifestly tends ......  As for susceptibility to pain, it is obviously essential to every part of corporeal life, and to discuss the question of degree is absurd.  On the other hand, human capacity for sorrow is equally necessary to our whole moral nature, and sorrow itself is a most essential process for the perfecting of the soul.” (Soul, pp. 43, 44.)

This, then, is the fine balm for all the anguish under which the world has been groaning for these thousands of years!  But, first, how does suffering tend to the perfection of the whole lower creation?  It enfeebles, and at last destroys them, I know; but I am yet to Learn that it is essential to the perfection of animal life.  Again, how does it minister to that of man, except he be more than the insect of the day, of which Mr. Newman’s theology leaves him in utter doubt?  And if he be immortal, how does it operate beneficially except as an instrument of moral improvement?  And how rarely (comparatively) do we see that it has that effect!  How often is it most prolonged and torturing in those who seem least to need it, and in those who are absolutely as yet incapable of learning from it; or, alas! are too evidently past learning from it!  How often do we see, slowly sinking under the protracted agonies of consumption, cancer, or stone, all these various classes of mortals, without our being able to assign, or even conjecture, the slightest reason for such experiments!  I acknowledge freely, all, at we can give no reasons for them; but it is to mock miserable humanity to give such reasons as these; doubly to mock it, if men be the ephemeral creatures which Mr. Newman’s theology leaves in such doubt:  since in that case we see not only (what we see at any rate) that physical evil does not always, nor even in many instances, produce a salutary moral effect, but that it hardly matters whether it does or not; for just as the poor patient may be beginning to be benefited by his discipline, and generally in consequence of it, he is unluckily annihilated; he dies of his medicine!  Surely, if physical evil be this grand elixir, never was such a precious balm so improvidently expended.  We may well say, only with much more reason, what the Jews said of Mary’s box of ointment,—­“Why was all this waste?” To be sure it is “given” in abundance “to the poor.”

And, at the best, this exquisite reasoning gives no account whatever of that suffering which falls upon innocent infancy and childhood.  It destroys them, however, and effectually prevents their attaining the “perfection” which it is so admirable an instrument of developing, and that too before they can be morally benefited by the “salutary” sorrow it brings!