the pain
which one person's removal inflicts upon surviving parties, this seems
the equally necessary consequence of their having affections. For if
any being feels love towards another, this implies his desire that the
intercourse with that other should continue; or what is the same thing,
the repugnance and aversion to its ceasing; that is, he must suffer
affliction for that removal of the beloved object. To create sentient
beings devoid of all feelings of affection was no doubt possible to
Omnipotence; but to endow those beings with such feelings as would give
the constant gratification derived from the benevolent affections, and
yet to make them wholly indifferent to the loss of the objects of those
affections, was not possible even for Omnipotence; because it was a
contradiction in terms, equivalent to making a thing both exist and not
exist at one and the same time. Would there have been any considerable
happiness in a life stripped of these kindly affections? We cannot
affirm that there would not, because we are ignorant what other
enjoyments might have been substituted for the indulgence of them. But
neither can we affirm that any such substitution could have been found;
and it lies upon those who deny the necessary connection between the
human mind, or any sentient being's mind, and grief for the loss of
friends, to show that there are other enjoyments which could furnish an
equivalent to the gratification derived from the benevolent feelings.
The question then reduces itself to this: Wherefore did a being, who
could have made sentient beings immortal, choose to make them mortal?
or, Wherefore has he placed man upon the earth for a time only? or,
Wherefore has he set bounds to the powers and capacities which he has
been pleased to bestow upon his creatures? And this is a question which
we certainly never shall be able to solve; but a question extremely
different from the one more usually put--How happens it that a good
being has made a world full of misery and death?

In the necessary ignorance wherein we are of the whole designs of the
Deity, we cannot wonder if some things, nay, if many things, are to our
faculties inscrutable. But we assuredly have no right to say that those
difficulties which try and vex us are incapable of a solution, any more
than we have to say, that those cases in which as yet we can see no
trace of design, are not equally the result of intelligence, and equally
conducive to a fixed an