difficulty. If Mr. Newman were the creator of the
universe, no question, none of these contradictions between
'intuitions' within, and stubborn 'facts' without, would be found.
He has created a God after his own mind; if he could but have created
a universe also after his own mind, we should doubtless have been
relieved from all our perplexities. But, unhappily, we find in it,
as I imagine, the very things which so startle Mr. Newman in the
Scriptural representations of the divine character and proceedings.
Is he not, like all other infidels, peculiarly scandalized, that God
should have enjoined the extermination of the Canaanites? and yet
does not God do still more startling things every day of our lives,
and which appear less startling only because we are familiar with
them,--at least, if we believe that the elements, pestilence, famine,
in a word, destruction in all its forms, really fulfil his bidding?
Is there any difference in the world between the cases, except that
the terrible phenomena which we find it impossible to account for
are on an infinitely larger scale, and in duration as ancient as the
world? that they have, in fact, been going on for thousands of weary
years, and for aught you or I can tell, and as Mr. Newman seems to
think probable, for millions of years? Does not a pestilence or a
famine send thousands of the guilty and the innocent alike--nay,
thousands of those who know not their right hand from their left--to
one common destruction? Does not God (if you suppose it his doing)
swallow up whole cities by earthquake, or overwhelm them with volcanic
fires? I say, is there any difference between the cases, except that
the victims are very rarely so wicked as the Canaanites are said to
have been, and that God in the one case himself does the very things
which he commissions men to do in the other? Now, if the thing be wrong,
I, for one, shall never think it less wrong to do it one's self than
to do it by proxy."

"But," said Fellowes, rather warmly, for he felt rather restive at
this part of Harrington's discourse, "it is absurd to compare such
sovereign acts of inexplicable will on the part of God with his
command to a being so constituted as man to perform them."

"Absurd be it," said Harrington, "only be so kind as to show it to be
so, instead of saying so. I maintain that the one class of facts are
just as 'inexplicable,' as you call it, as the other, and only appear
otherwise because, in the on