e illness. In the economy
of the mind it is the same thing. All our exertions are stimulated by
curiosity, and the gratification is extreme of satisfying it. But it
might have been otherwise ordered, and some painful feeling might have
been made the only stimulant to the acquisition of knowledge. So, the
charm of novelty is proverbial; but it might have been the unceasing
cause of the most painful alarms. Habit renders every thing easy; but
the repetition might have only increased the annoyance. The loss of one
organ makes the others more acute. But the partial injury might have
caused, as it were, a general paralysis. 'Tis thus that Paley is well
justified in exclaiming, "It is a happy world after all!" The pains and
the sufferings, bodily and mental, to which we are exposed, if they
do not sink into nothing, at least retreat within comparatively narrow
bounds; the ills are hardly seen when we survey the great and splendid
picture of worldly enjoyment or ease.

But the existence of considerable misery is undeniable: and the question
is, of course, confined to that. Its exaggeration, in the ordinary
estimate both of the vulgar and of skeptical reasoners, is equally
certain. Paley, Bishop Sumner, as well as Derham, King, Ray and others
of the older writers, have made many judicious and generally correct
observations upon its amount, and they, as well as some of the able
and learned authors of the _Bridgwater Treatises_, have done much in
establishing deductions necessary to be made, in order that we may
arrive at the true amount. That many things, apparently unmixed evils,
when examined more narrowly, prove to be partially beneficial, is the
fair result of their well-meant labors; and this, although anything
rather than a proof that there is no evil at all, yet is valuable as
still further proving the analogy between this branch of the argument
and that upon design; and in giving hopes that all may possibly be
found hereafter to be good, as everything will assuredly be found to be
contrived with an intelligent and useful purpose. It may be right to add
a remark or two upon some evils, and those of the greatest magnitude
in the common estimate of human happiness, with a view of further
illustrating this part of the subject.

Mere imperfection must altogether be deducted from the account. It
never can be contended that any evil nature can be ascribed to the first
cause, merely for not having endowed sentient creatures wit