hat being a fiend, were all the world besides to call him God. Am I
told that this is arrogance? It is nothing of the kind; it is plain
morality, and to say otherwise would be to hide our eyes from murder
because we dread the Murderer. Am I told that I am not competent to judge
the purposes of the Almighty? I answer that if these are _purposes_, I _am_
able to judge of them so far as I can see; and if I am expected to judge of
his purposes when they appear to be beneficent, I am in consistency obliged
also to judge of them when they appear to be malevolent. And it can be no
possible extenuation of the latter to point to the "final result" as "order
and beauty," so long as the means adopted by the "_Omnipotent_ Designer"
are known to have been so revolting. All that we could legitimately assert
in this case would be, that so far as observation can extend, "he cares for
animal perfection" _to the exclusion of_ "animal enjoyment," and even to
the _total disregard_ of animal suffering. But to assert this would merely
be to deny beneficence as an attribute of God.

The dilemma, therefore, which Epicurus has stated with great lucidity, and
which Professor Flint quotes, appears to me so obvious as scarcely to
require statement. The dilemma is, that, looking to the facts of organic
nature, theists must abandon their belief, either in the divine
omnipotence, or in the divine beneficence. And yet, such is the warping
effect of preformed beliefs on the mind, that even so candid a writer as
Professor Flint can thus write of this most obvious truth:--

"The late Mr. John Stuart Mill, for no better reason than that nature
sometimes drowns men and burns them, and that childbirth is a painful
process, maintained that God could not possibly be infinite. I shall not
say what I think of the shallowness and self-conceit displayed by such an
argument. What it proves is not the finiteness of God, but the littleness
of man. The mind of man never shows itself so small as when it tries to
measure the attributes and limit the greatness of its Creator."

But the argument--or rather the truism--in question is an attempt to do
neither the one nor the other; it simply asserts the patent fact that, if
God is omnipotent, and so had an unlimited choice of means whereby to
accomplish the ends of "animal perfection," "animal enjoyment," and the
rest; then the fact of his having chosen to adopt the means which he has
adopted is a fact which is wholly inco