the whole question why matter was created with such properties as
of necessity to produce evil? It was impossible, says he, to avoid it
consistently with the laws of motion and matter. Unquestionably; but
the whole dispute is upon those laws. If indeed the laws of nature, the
existing constitution of the material world, were assumed as necessary,
and as binding upon the Deity, how is it possible that any question ever
could have been raised? The Deity having the power to make those laws,
to endow matter with that constitution, and having also the power to
make different laws and to give matter another constitution, the whole
question is, how his choosing to create the present existing order of
things--the laws and the constitution which we find to prevail--can be
reconciled with perfect goodness. The whole argument of the Archbishop
assumes that matter and its laws are independent of the Deity; and the
only conclusion to which the inquiry leads us is that the Creator has
made a world with as little of evil in it as the nature of things,--that
is, as the laws of nature and matter--allowed him; which is nonsense,
if those laws were made by him, and leaves the question where it was, or
rather solves it by giving up the omnipotence of the Creator, if these
laws were binding upon him.

It must be added, however, that Dr. King and Dr. Law are not singular in
pursuing this most inconclusive course of reasoning.

Thus Dr. J. Clarke, in his treatise on natural evil, quoted by Bishop
Law (Note 32), shows how mischiefs arise from the laws of matter; and
says this could not be avoided "without altering those primary laws,
i. e., making it something else than what it is, or changing it into
another form; the result of which would only be to render it liable to
evils of another kind against which the same objections would equally
lie." So Dr. J. Burnett, in his discourses on evil, at the Boyle Lecture
(vol. ii. P. 201), conceives that he explains death by saying that the
materials of which the body is composed "cannot last beyond seventy
years, or thereabouts, and it was originally intended that we should die
at that age." Pain, too, he imagines is accounted for by observing that
we are endowed with feelings, and that if we could not feel pain,
so neither could we pleasure (p. 202). Again, he says that there are
certain qualities which "in the nature of things matter is incapable of"
(p. 207). And as if he really felt the pressure o