Sad Gethsemane, the bower of baleful night,
Where Christ a health of poison for us drew;
Yet all our honey in that poison grew:
So we from sweetest flowers could suck our bane,
And Christ, from bitter venom, could again
Extract life out of death, and pleasure out of pain.—Giles Fletcher.
If, as we have endeavoured to show, a necessary holiness is a contradiction in terms, then the existence of natural evil may be easily reconciled with the divine goodness, in so far as it may be necessary to punish and prevent moral evil. Indeed, the divine goodness itself demands the punishment of moral evil, in order to restrain its prevalence, and shut out the disorders it tends to introduce into the moral universe. Nor is it any impeachment of the infinite wisdom and goodness of God, if the evils inflicted upon the commission of sin be sufficiently great to answer the purpose for which they are intended—that is, to stay the frightful progress and ravages of moral evil. Hence it was that the sin of one man brought “death into the world, and all our woe.” Thus the good providence of God, no less than his word, speaks this tremendous lesson to his intelligent creatures: “Behold the awful spectacle of a world lying in ruins, and tremble at the very thought of sin! A thousand deaths are not so terrible as one sin!”