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sible for me to feel anything but a very cold love, reverence, 
or adoration for a being whose attributes are merely conceived 
of as regulative. To bring such feelings into active play, I 
want the positive aspects of those qualities. We love Him 
because He first loved us, is surely no regulative idea. If 
such ideas had been presented by Christianity as regulative 
only, she would never have exhibited a noble army of martyrs ; 
for that it is possible to embrace ideas by faith, while I cannot 
conceive of them by reason, is to me utterly incomprehensible. 
But it is right to face the difficulties of Mr. Mill's view and 
my own, and I do not think that Mr. Mill has faced them . Ad- 
mitting that the moral attributes of Deity are the same as 
those in man, only perfect, we are bound — as in action 
man's moral attributes are capable of modifying each other 
— to extend the same principle to the moral attributes of 
God. If this be correct, it will require a modification of Mr. 
Mill's conclusions. As God is guided by a higher wisdom than 
that of man, the outward manifestations of His moral attributes 
may, within definite limits, appear different from the human. 
It follows, therefore, that it will be impossible to determine 
the precise mode of their manifestation on grounds purely 
abstract. 
It is an unquestionable fact, that the universe presents 
phenomena which our reason, with the limited views which it 
can take of the moral government of God, is unable to recon- 
cile with the conceptions of benevolence, justice, or holiness, 
as they exist in man. I shall select only one example, — the 
existence of evil, both physical and moral. All the efforts 
which have been made to reconcile this with the infinitude or 
the perfection of the Divine attributes have proved complete 
failures. Nor have the attempts to explain away its existence 
as a fact been more successful. One practical answer is worth 
a thousand abstract arguments. — We feel it. 
If we assume that God could have prevented it, and has not, 
we assign imperfection to His moral attributes ; if, that He was 
unable to prevent it, we limit either His power or His wis- 
dom. Some have assumed that it involves a contradiction to 
assert the possibility of creating free agency, and not along 
with it the necessity of creating the possibility, nay, the 
certainty of the existence of moral evil. I cannot see that 
these two ideas fulfil the conditions of a logical contradiction, 
which is the only ground on which we can certainly predicate 
impossibility of Omnipotence. How then are we to meet the 
difficulty in question ? The facts of the created universe are 
our only source of knowledge as to the line of action which the 
moral attributes of the Creator dictate. Beyond what they 
