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the punishment due to his own fault. The great difficulty before us is, 

 however, moral evil. Undoubtedly, as far as we as individuals are con- 

 cerned, the Christian Revelation does explain it. We have the remedy 

 offered, and if we do not accept it, it is our own fault. 



The Chairman. — I may perhaps be allowed to bring the discussion to a 

 close. I confess I have been very much struck by many of the remarks 

 that have been made, and that I fully appreciate their importance and 

 value. It seems to me to be one of those results that must necessarily 

 spring from the doctrines which have recently prevailed, and which have 

 culminated in a renunciation of the existence of a God at all, that certain 

 people now undertake to put themselves in the place of God, and are dis- 

 posed to consider whether they could not manage the affairs of the universe 

 better than they are managed by the Creator. These men, having taken on 

 themselves this mission, have assumed the ability to determine how the 

 world should have been made — of how, indeed, the worlds embracing the 

 universe ought to have been constructed, and how this portion of the 

 universe should have been provided with everything which ought to exist 

 on the face of the earth. This, no doubt, is a very considerable work for 

 any man, or any set of men, to take in hand ; and it is quite possible that 

 they have got enough to do when they come to the conclusion that they 

 could have done it all much better themselves if they had undertaken the 

 task. To compare small things with great, I have always regarded it as a 

 very sound principle, in judging of the acts of human beings in this world, 

 that when they undertake anything with the modest belief that they are 

 able to perform what they have engaged to do, the most imwise thing we 

 can do is to form a definite judgment on what they have done, without 

 first communicating with the workers themselves, and ascertaining their 

 reasons for what they undertook, and the mode in which they have per- 

 formed their task. Because, if we endeavour to judge of what people have done 

 without knowing why they did it, the probability is we may make a very 

 grave mistake in coming to a conclusion adverse to their mode of proce- 

 dure ; at all events, they may be able to show that, if we have our idea, 

 their way is at least as good as ours, and, perhaps, on comparison, a great 

 deal better. If, then, we bring ourselves to this state of feeling, we shall see 

 the extravagant absurdity of putting ourselves in a position to arraign the 

 great work of the creation and preservation of this universe. (Hear, hear.) 

 We have no means of ascertaining, and still less of determining, what was 

 the exact scheme in view, and what were the processes of the creation and 

 preservation of the world. We presume to say that this and that are evils, 

 but we do not know ; in fact, we have absolutely no knowledge of the 

 grounds, if I may speak in conventional language, on which the relations of 

 things have proceeded. We do not know, when told that animals pi'ey 

 upon each other, what was the purpose for which one creature was so consti- 

 tuted in relation to another that it should make the other its prey. The 

 more we reflect as to what we ought to know, in order to be able to form a 



