342 NATURAL THEOLOar. 



sublime, and of all, perhaps, the most acceptable to the 

 Deity — would, it is evident, be excluded from a constitution 

 in which happiness and misery regularly followed virtue and 

 vice. Patience and composure under distress, affliction, and 

 pain ; a steadfast keeping up of our confidence in God, and 

 of our reliance upon his final goodness, at the time when 

 every thing present is adverse and discouraging, and — what 

 is no less difficult to retain — a cordial desire for the happi- 

 ness of others, even when we are deprived of our own — these, 

 dispositions, which constitute perhaps the perfection of oui 

 moral nature, would not have found their proper office and 

 object in a state of avovred retribution ; and in which, con- 

 sequently, endurance of evil would be only submission to 

 punishment. 



Again, one man's sufferings may be another man's trial. 

 The family of a sick parent is a school of fihal piety. The 

 dharities of domestic life, and not only these, but all the 

 social virtues, are called out by distress. But then misery, 

 to be the proper object of mitigation, or of that benevolence 

 which endeavors to relieve, must be really or apparently 

 casual. It is upon such sufferings alone that benevolence 

 can operate. For were there no evils in the world but what 

 were punishments properly and intelligibly such, benevolence 

 would only stand in the way of justice. Such evils, consist- 

 ently with the administration of moral government, could 

 not be prevented or alleviated ; that is to say, could not be 

 remitted in whole or in part, except by the au-thority which 

 inflicted them, or by an appellate or superior authority. 

 This consideration which is founded in our most acknow- 

 ledged apprehensions of the nature of penal justice, maypos- 

 sess its weight in the divine counsels. Virtue perhaps is 

 the greatest of all ends. In human beings, relative virtues 

 form a large part of the whole. Now, relative virtue pre- 

 supposes not only the existence of evil, without which it 

 could have no object, no material to work upon, but that 

 ^vils be apparently, at least, misfortunes ; that is, the effectg 



