are yearly buried in the caverns of the ocean.
Let us call to mind in man, the prime ornament of the creation, all the
diseases to which his frame is subject,

Convulsions, epilepsies, fierce catarrhs,
Intestine stone and ulcer, colic pangs,
Demoniac frenzy, moping melancholy,
And moon-struck madness, pining atrophy,
Marasmus, and wide-wasting pestilence,
Dropsies, and asthmas, and joint-racking rheums.

The very idea of our killing, and subsisting upon the flesh of animals,
surely somewhat jars with our conceptions of infinite benevolence.

But, when we look at the political history of man, the case is
infinitely worse. This too often seems one tissue of misery and vice.
War, conquest, oppression, tyranny, slavery, insurrections, massacres,
cruel punishments, degrading corporal infliction, and the extinction of
life under the forms of law, are to be found in almost every page. It is
as if an evil demon were let loose upon us, and whole nations, from one
decad of years to another, were struck with the most pernicious madness.
Certain reasoners tell us that this is owing to the freedom of will,
without which man could not exist. But here we are presented with an
alternative, from which it is impossible for human understanding to
escape. Either God, according to our ideas of benevolence, would remove
evil out of the world, and cannot; or he can, and will not. If he has
the will and not the power, this argues weakness; if he has the power
and not the will, this seems to be malevolence.

Let us descend from the great stage of the nations, and look into the
obscurities of private misery. Which of us is happy? What bitter springs
of misery overflow the human heart, and are borne by us in silence! What
cruel disappointments beset us! To what struggles are we doomed, while
we struggle often in vain! The human heart seems framed, as if to be the
capacious receptacle of all imaginable sorrows. The human frame seems
constructed, as if all its fibres were prepared to sustain varieties
of torment. "In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread, till thou
return to the earth." But how often does that sweat prove ineffective!
There are men of whom sorrow seems to be the destiny, from which they
can never escape. There are hearts, into which by their constitution
it appears as if serenity and content could never enter, but which
are given up to all the furious passions, or are for ever the prey of
repining and depress