256 PURPOSE AND GENERAL CONDITION 



being would, in his own limited sphere of action, think of pro- 

 ducing a similar system upon an opposite principle. But to 

 form so vast a range of being, and to make being everywhere 

 a source of gratification, is conformable to our ideas of a 

 Creator, in w r hom we are constantly discovering traits of a 

 nature, of which our own is a faint and far-cast shadow. 



It appears at first difficult to reconcile with this idea the 

 many miseries which we see all sentient beings, ourselves 

 included, occasionally enduring. How, the sage has asked in 

 every age, should a Being so transcendently kind, have 

 allowed of so large an admixture of evil in the condition of 

 his creatures ? Do we not at length find an answer to a 

 certain extent satisfactory, in the view which has now been 

 given of the constitution of nature ? We there see the Deity 

 operating in the most august of his works by fixed laws, an 

 arrangement which, it is clear, only admits of the main and 

 primary results being good, but disregards exceptions. Now 

 the mechanical laws are so definite in their purposes, that no 

 exceptions ever take place in that department ; if there is a 

 certain quantity of fluid matter to be agglomerated and 

 divided and set in motion as a planetary system, it will be so 

 with hair's-breadth accuracy, and cannot be otherwise. But 

 the laws presiding over meteorology, life, and mind, are 

 necessarily less definite, as they have to produce a great 

 variety of mutually related results. Left to act indepen- 

 dently of each other, each according to its separate commis- 

 sion, and each with a wide range of potentiality to be modi- 

 fied by associated conditions, they can only have effects gene- 

 rally beneficial. Often there must be an interference of one 

 law with another ; often a law will chance to operate in 

 excess, or upon a wrong object, and thus evil will be pro- 

 duced. Thus, winds are generally useful in many ways, and 

 the sea is useful as a means of communication between one 

 country and another ; but the natural law r s which produce 

 winds are of indefinite range of action, and sometimes are 

 unusually concentrated in space or in time, so as to produce 

 storms and hurricanes, by which much damage is done ; the 

 sea may be by these causes violently agitated, so that many 



