ith our primitive "moral intuitions"
(if we have any), we should hold him who had the power to prevent a
wrong, and did not use it, as a participator and accomplice in the
crime he did not prevent. Applying, therefore, the principles of
Mr. Newman, I must refuse to acknowledge such conduct on the part of
the Divine Being, and to say, that such things are not done by him.
If I may trust my whisper of him, derived from analogous moral qualities
in myself, I must believe that an administration which so ruthlessly
permits these things is not his work; but that his power, wisdom, and
goodness have been thwarted, baffled, and overmastered by some
"omnipotent devil," to use Mr. Newman's expression; if it be, then that
whisper of him cannot be trusted: the heathen was right, "Sunt superis
sua jura." In other words, I feel that I must become an Atheist, a
Pantheist, a Manichaean, or--what I am--a sceptic.

All these perplexities are increased when I trace them up to that
profound mystery in which they all originate,--I mean the permission
of physical and moral evil. Either evil could have been prevented or
not; if it could, its immense and horrible prevalence is at war with
the intuition already referred to; if it could not, who shall prove it?
I am no more able to contradict the intuitions of the intellect than
those of the conscience; and if any thing can be called a contradiction
of the former, it is to be told that a Being of infinite power, wisdom,
and beneficence could not construct a world without an immensity of evil
in it; no reason being assignable or even imaginable for such a
proposition, except the fact that such a world has not been created!
I am therefore compelled to doubt, whether such a universe be really
the fabrication of such a Being. It is impossible to express my
astonishment at the ease with which Mr. Newman disposes of the
difficulties connected with the origin and perpetuation of physical
and moral evil. His arguments are just two of the most hackneyed
commonplaces with which metaphysicians have attempted to evade these
stupendous difficulties; and it is not too much to say, that there
never was a man who was not resolved that his theory must stand, who
pretended to attach any importance to them. They are most gratuitously
assumed, and even then are most trivial alleviations; a mere
plaster of brown paper for a deep-seated cancer.

I certainly know of no other man who has stood so unabashed in front
o