264 PURPOSE AND GENERAL CONDITION 



patients as to catch the infection, of which he dies in a few 

 days, while the other, a bad husband and father, and who, 

 unlike the other, only attends such cases with selfish ends, 

 takes care to be as much as possible out of the stream of in- 

 fection, and accordingly escapes. In both of these cases 

 man's sense of good and evil his faculty of conscientiousness 

 would incline him to destine the vicious man to destruction 

 and save the virtuous. But the Great Ruler of Nature does 

 not act on such principles. He has established laws for the 

 operation of inanimate matter, which are quite unswerving, 

 so that, when we know them, we have only to act in a certain 

 way with respect to them, in order to obtain all the benefits 

 and avoid all the evils connected with them. He has likewise 

 established moral laws in our nature, which are equally un- 

 swerving, (allowing for their wider range of action,) and 

 from obedience to which unfailing good is to be derived. 

 But the two sets of laws are independent of each other. Obe- 

 dience to each gives only its own proper advantage, not the 

 advantage proper to the other. Hence it is that virtue forms 

 no protection against the evils connected with the physical 

 laws, while, on the other hand, a man skilled in, and atten- 

 tive to these, but unrighteous and disregardful of his neigh- 

 bour, is in like manner not protected by his attention to phy- 

 sical circumstances from the proper consequences of neglect 

 or breach of the moral laws. 



Thus it is that the innocence of the party suffering for the 

 faults of a parent, or of any other person or set of persons, is 

 evidently a consideration quite apart from that suffering. 



In short, the whole question of evil, a puzzle throughout 

 all ages, only becomes explicable when we receive and study 

 the system of a mundane government in the manner of law. 

 There is no need for considering it as a detraction from either 

 the power or the goodness of God. The dispensation under which 

 we live has been constituted by him on the principle of law; but 

 this is not necessarily to imply that either his goodness or his 

 power is to stop at this point. That such, however, is the 

 character of the pageantry of worldly events now passing, is 

 the only idea we can arrive at when we approach the ques- 



