ity is so far limited in his power of adapting means to ends that the
particular method adopted in this case was the best, all things considered,
that he was able to adopt. For supposing the Deity to be, what Professor
Flint maintains that he is--viz., omnipotent--and there can be no inference
more transparent than that such wholesale suffering, for whatever ends
designed, exhibits an incalculably greater deficiency of beneficence in the
divine character than that which we know in any, the very worst, of human
characters. For let us pause for one moment to think of what suffering in
nature means. Some hundreds of millions of years ago some millions of
millions of animals must be supposed to have been sentient. Since that time
till the present, there must have been millions and millions of generations
of millions of millions of individuals. And throughout all this period of
incalculable duration, this inconceivable host of sentient organisms have
been in a state of unceasing battle, dread, ravin, pain. Looking to the
outcome, we find that more than half of the species which have survived the
ceaseless struggle are parasitic in their habits, lower and insentient
forms of life feasting on higher and sentient forms; we find teeth and
talons whetted for slaughter, hooks and suckers moulded for
torment--everywhere a reign of terror, hunger, and sickness, with oozing
blood and quivering limbs, with gasping breath and eyes of innocence that
dimly close in deaths of brutal torture! Is it said that there are
compensating enjoyments? I care not to strike the balance; the enjoyments I
plainly perceive to be as physically necessary as the pains, and this
whether or not evolution is due to design. Therefore all I am concerned
with is to show, that if such a state of things is due to "omnipotent
design," the omnipotent designer must be concluded, so far as reason can
infer, to be non-beneficent. And this it is not difficult to show. When I
see a rabbit panting in the iron jaws of a spring-trap, I abhor the
devilish nature of the being who, with full powers of realising what pain
means, can deliberately employ his noble faculties of invention in
contriving a thing so hideously cruel. But if I could believe that there is
a being who, with yet higher faculties of thought and knowledge, and with
an unlimited choice of means to secure his ends, has contrived untold
thousands of mechanisms no less diabolical than a spring-trap; I should
call t