necessity. The idea of choice excludes it, and the word must applies no longer. A sphere of active power is entrusted to its own keeping, and it depends on its own choice what line of conduct it shall pursue. Yet, since it is a creature, it must be under law to its Creator. That law, having for its object such a gift, by which the creature is found to resemble the Creator, must also have for its rule that essential perfection which is inseparable from the will of God. Necessity being excluded by the nature of the gift, obligation must supply its place. It is the only form of law which is applicable to a creature so endowed; and since a law there must be, or it would not be a creature, it ought to be like God, because it is formed in His image; it ought to do the will of God with a free and willing submission, because it is really the work of His hand. These two maxims, derived from the very constitution of every moral agent, created in the image of its Maker; that it ought to serve Him with the complete submission of unconscious matter, which cannot choose but obey, and to reflect His perfect goodness, with a liberty and purity like those of the Creator himself; are the poles around which the whole universe of moral obligation must revolve perpetually.

Such agents, however noble the faculties with which they are endowed, have limitations, which arise from the fact that they are creatures, and constitute the metaphysical evil inseparable from their being. They may be immortal, but they are not from eternity. They may be pure, but they are not immutable. They may

have vast powers of intelligence, but there is a bound to their actual knowledge. They may apprehend God, by a spiritual intuition; but they cannot comprehend Him, or search out all the depths of His infinite being. They may be good, wearing the image of their Maker; but, unlike Him, they can be tempted with evil. They may be dwelling in the truth; but it is in their choice to abide in that truth, or to depart from it into falsehood and darkness. As created by God, they have a Divine capacity for attaining higher and higher degrees of moral insight and pure intelligence. As formed out of nothing, they may be called children of an eternal night, and are equally capable of losing themselves in an awful abyss of moral darkness. The greatness of the gifts bestowed upon them must measure the greatness of their possible fall; since godlike powers abused, while their natural excellence remains, must issue in a moral chaos, abounding in every hateful form of diabolical wickedness.

Thus every creature of God, called out of nothing by his almighty power, is like a planet in the sunlight, with one hemisphere of natural good, and another of natural evil. As born of God, it is simply and purely good; as born out of nothingness, it is purely and simply evil. But this evil, in the first state of creation, is not the same with impurity or moral guilt. In natural things, it is simply defect, or the essential limitation of their being. In moral agents, it is defectibility as well as limitation, and includes the possibility of abusing the power of choice, that highest gift of the bountiful

Creator. Every creature, as soon as created, casts from it a shadow on the side opposite to the True Sun. From the very fact of its existence there result inevitably many possibilities of evil. No simple act, even of Almighty Power, can set aside this eternal truth. But it is the very province of Infinite Wisdom to dispose, overrule, and control all the creatures Omnipotence has made; and, recognising the unalterable contrast of light and darkness, of moral good and evil, so to unfold it before the eyes of the moral universe, that the unfallen may be maintained in their sinless purity; and the fallen and rebellious either recovered to purity again, or compelled, while enduring the righteous judgment of the Most High, to manifest, through eternal ages, the height and depth of His victorious goodness.

CHAPTER III.

ON THE CREATION OF FREE AGENTS.

THE creation of moral and accountable beings is the first main step in those ways of Divine Providence which have caused deep and perplexed questionings in thoughtful minds. If it was decreed, by the wisdom and goodness of the Most High, to create beings like angels and men, so nobly endowed, why did not his Almighty Power secure them against the fearful inroads of moral evil, with its present, undeniable fruits of worldwide sorrow, and those still sadder results which revelation sets before us, of everlasting shame and ruin? How can the permission of such a fall, if it could easily have been averted, be reconcilable with the simplest notion of benevolence? or what possible gain can result, that might not have been secured by the hand of Omnipotence, without an experience so unutterably awful? And again, if it be held that such a course was impossible in its own nature, the difficulty seems to recur in another form. Why did not the Almighty refrain from the exercise of his creative power, when He foreknew certainly that the issue, to an innumerable multitude, if not to the great majority of the spirits He made, would

be to involve them in a dark abyss of hopeless despair and awful misery?

These difficulties were fully stated by the philosopher Bayle, at the close of the seventeenth century; and Leibnitz, in his "Theodicæa," has exercised the powers of his eminently fertile and profound intellect in furnishing a reply. If the views he there propounds were altogether just and valid, the only aim of a later writer should be, to expand them into fuller detail, and bring them out into clearer relief by a popular exposition. But though no previous writer has perhaps done more to throw light upon the subject, his theory appears too metaphysical and cold, too closely mixed up with his baseless hypothesis of the pre-established harmony, and borders too nearly on the fatal maxim, that evil may be chosen on account of its supposed good results, to give full satisfaction to the intelligent Christian. The statement, however, he has made of the difficulties to be surmounted, will form a suitable preface to our further inquiries. May the Spirit who searcheth even the deep things of God, go before us with a torch of heavenly truth, that we may not lose our footing amidst these ocean pathways of Divine Providence!

"It may be objected," the German philosopher observes, in prefacing his reply to the arguments of Bayle, "that all the reality, and what is called the substance of the act, in sin itself, is the work of God, since all creatures and all their acts derive from Him whatever is real in them; whence it might be inferred that He is not only the physical, but even the moral cause of sin; since