wo measures widely different from each other!" Alas! that
the same mind, that the same god-like intelligence, which has measured
worlds and systems, should thus have wasted its stupendous energies in
striving to measure a metaphor!

When I think of its grandeur and its triumphs, I bow with reverence before
its power, and am ready to despair of ever seeing it go farther than it
has already gone; but when I think of its littleness and its failures, I
take courage again, and determine to toil on as a living atom among living
atoms. The glory of its triumphs does not discourage me, because I also
see its littleness; nor can its littleness extinguish in me the light of
hope, because I also see the glory of its triumphs. And surely this is
right; for the intellect of man, so conspicuously combining the attributes
of the angel and of the worm, is not to be despised without infinite
danger, nor followed without infinite caution.

Such, indeed, is the weakness and fallibility of the human mind, even in
its brightest forms, that we cannot for a moment imagine, that the
inherent difficulties of the dark enigma of the world are insuperable,
because they have not been clearly and fully solved by a Leibnitz or an
Edwards. On the contrary, we are perfectly persuaded that in the end the
wonder will be, not that such a question should have been attempted after
so many illustrious failures, but that any such failure should have been
made. This will appear the more probable, if we consider the precise
nature of the problem to be solved, and not lose ourselves in dark and
unintelligible notions. It is not to do some great thing--it is simply to
refute the sophism of the atheist. If God were both willing and able to
prevent sin, which is the only supposition consistent with the idea of
God, says the atheist, he would certainly have prevented it, and sin would
never have made its appearance in the world. But sin has made its
appearance in the world; and hence, God must have been either unable or
unwilling to prevent it. Now, if we take either term of this alternative,
we must adopt a conclusion which is at war with the idea of a God.

Such is the argument of the atheist; and sad indeed must be the condition
of the Christian world if it be forever unable to meet and refute such a
sophism. Yet, it is the error involved in this sophism which obscures our
intellectual vision, and causes so perplexing a darkness to spread itself
over the moral o