ould exist. Can Mr Sadler prove that this is an
impossibility?

One single expression which Mr Sadler employs on this subject is
sufficient to show how utterly incompetent he is to discuss it. "On the
Christian hypothesis," says he, "no doubt exists as to the origin of
evil." He does not, we think, understand what is meant by the origin
of evil. The Christian Scriptures profess to give no solution of that
mystery. They relate facts: but they leave the metaphysical question
undetermined. They tell us that man fell; but why he was not so
constituted as to be incapable of falling, or why the Supreme Being has
not mitigated the consequences of the Fall more than they actually have
been mitigated, the Scriptures did not tell us, and, it may without
presumption be said, could not tell us, unless we had been creatures
different from what we are. There is something, either in the nature of
our faculties or in the nature of the machinery employed by us for the
purpose of reasoning, which condemns us, on this and similar subjects,
to hopeless ignorance. Man can understand these high matters only by
ceasing to be man, just as a fly can understand a lemma of Newton only
by ceasing to be a fly. To make it an objection to the Christian system
that it gives us no solution of these difficulties, is to make it an
objection to the Christian system that it is a system formed for human
beings. Of the puzzles of the Academy, there is not one which does not
apply as strongly to Deism as to Christianity, and to Atheism as to
Deism. There are difficulties in everything. Yet we are sure that
something must be true.

If revelation speaks on the subject of the origin of evil it speaks
only to discourage dogmatism and temerity. In the most ancient, the most
beautiful, and the most profound of all works on the subject, the Book
of Job, both the sufferer who complains of the divine government, and
the injudicious advisers who attempt to defend it on wrong principles,
are silenced by the voice of supreme wisdom, and reminded that the
question is beyond the reach of the human intellect. St Paul silences
the supposed objector, who strives to force him into controversy, in
the same manner. The church has been, ever since the apostolic times,
agitated by this question, and by a question which is inseparable from
it, the question of fate and free-will. The greatest theologians and
philosophers have acknowledged that these things were too high for them,