OF THE BRUTE CREATION. 783 
will be fulfilled in another planet. The following passage is still 
more pertinent to our subject*: — 
“ The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall 
lie down with the kid ; and the calf and the young lion and the 
fatling together ; and a little child shall lead them. And the cow 
and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: 
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the sucking child 
shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put 
his hand on the cockatrice den. They shall not hurt nor destroy 
in all my holy mountain : for the earth shall be full of the know- 
ledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.” 
It is impossible that this prophecy can ever be fulfilled on our 
planet, constituted as it is ; but it may in some other, where their 
present natural instincts will be altered, and there will be an end to 
the oppression and universal war ; when the lion shall no longer 
thirst after blood, nor the tiger after his prey. 
Philosophers and divines, from the days of Zoroaster to the pre- 
sent time, have never been able to solve this problem, — why an 
all-powerful and benevolent Being should have created evil; and 
why a Being of perfect power and benevolence should have formed 
so many creatures to suffer misery and death 1 I would answer 
these questions by propounding others : — Why is our planet con- 
stituted as it is! 
Why is not man a God, and earth a heaven ? 
The fact is, that, if we knew all, it would most probably be found 
that the amount of evil is comparatively little, and that it is produc- 
tive of good. Death is an evil to the individual dying — at least he 
generally thinks so ; but to all others beyond his connexion it is a 
good. If it were not for death, what would become of the living, el- 
bowed by each other, by animals, and by plants] or, indeed, with uni- 
versal life, how could any thing live at all, since we live upon each 
other ] There is only one way to account for this supposed moral dis- 
order, and that is, by supposing this our earth to be a nursery of the 
immaterial principle — that it here passes into a certain state of ex- 
istence, in a profusion that seems to our unassisted reason to be 
extremely lavish, but which will elsewhere be employed in some ad- 
vanced or ulterior condition, and in other modes of material existence. 
There is a very large part of our massy and animated globe 
which bears no relation to its human population. This supposition 
therefore seems not irrational, that it may have some unexplained 
relation with those orbs that have been made expressly to be our 
sister planets. “ And in that day will I make a covenant for them” 
saith the Lord, by the mouth of his prophet Hosea, “ with the 
beasts of the field , and with the creeping things of the ground” 
* Isaiah, chap. xi. 
