Thus Dr. J. Clarke, in his treatise on natural evil, quoted by Bishop Law (Note 32), shows how mischiefs arise from the laws of matter; and says this could not be avoided “without altering those primary laws, i. e., making it something else than what it is, or changing it into another form; the result of which would only be to render it liable to evils of another kind against which the same objections would equally lie.” So Dr. J. Burnett, in his discourses on evil, at the Boyle Lecture (vol. ii. P. 201), conceives that he explains death by saying that the materials of which the body is composed “cannot last beyond seventy years, or thereabouts, and it was originally intended that we should die at that age.” Pain, too, he imagines is accounted for by observing that we are endowed with feelings, and that if we could not feel pain, so neither could we pleasure (p. 202). Again, he says that there are certain qualities which “in the nature of things matter is incapable of” (p. 207). And as if he really felt the pressure of this difficulty, he at length comes to this conclusion, that life is a free gift, which we had no right to exact, and which the Deity lay under no necessity to grant, and therefore we must take it with the conditions annexed (p. 210); which is undeniably true, but is excluding the discussion and not answering the question proposed. Nor must it be forgotten that some reasoners deal strangely with the facts. Thus Derham, in his Physico-Theology, explaining the use of poison in snakes, first desires us to bear in mind that many venomous ones are of use medicinally in stubborn diseases, which is not true, and if it were, would prove nothing, unless the venom, not the flesh, were proved to be medicinal; and then says, they are “scourges upon ungrateful and sinful men;” adding the truly astounding absurdity, “that the nations which know not God are the most annoyed with noxious reptiles and other pernicious creatures.” (Book ix. c. I); which if it were true would raise a double difficulty, by showing that one people was scourged because another had neglected to preach the gospel among them. Dr. J. Burnett, too, accounts for animals being suffered to be killed as food for man, by affirming that they thereby gain all the care which man is thus led to bestow upon them, and so are, on the whole, the better for being eaten. (Boyle Lecture, II. 207). But the most singular error has perhaps been fallen into by Dr. Sherlock, and the most, unhappy—which yet Bishop Law has cited as a sufficient answer to the objection respecting death: “It is a great instrument of government, and makes men afraid of committing such villanies as the laws of their country have made capital.” (Note 34). So that the greatest error in the criminal legislation of all countries forms part of the divine providence, and man has at length discovered, by the light of reason, the folly and the wickedness of using an instrument expressly created by divine Omniscience to be abused!
The remaining portion of King’s work, filling the second volume of Bishop Law’s edition, is devoted to the explanation of Moral Evil; and here the gratuitous assumption of the “nature of things,” and the “laws of nature,” more or less pervade the whole as in the former parts of the Inquiry.
The fundamental position of the whole is, that man having been endowed with free will, his happiness consists in making due elections, or in the right exercise of that free will. Five causes are then given of undue elections, in which of course his misery consists as far as that depends on himself; these causes are error, negligence, over-indulgence of free choice, obstinacy or bad habit, and the importunity of natural appetites; which last, it must in passing be remarked, belongs to the head of physical evil, and cannot be assumed in this discussion without begging the question. The great difficulty is then stated and grappled with, namely, how to reconcile these undue elections with divine goodness. The objector states that free will might exist without the power of making undue elections, he being suffered to range, as it were, only among lawful objects of choice. But the answer to this seems sound, that such a will would only be free in name; it would be free to choose among certain things, but would not be free-will. The objector again urges, that either the choice is free and may fall upon evil objects, against the goodness of God, or it is so restrained as only to fall on good objects. Against freedom of the will King’s solution is, that more evil would result from preventing these undue elections than from suffering them, and so the Deity has only done the best he could in the circumstances; a solution obviously liable to the same objection as that respecting Natural Evil. There are three ways, says the Archbishop, in which undue elections might have been prevented; not creating a free agent—constant interference with his free-will—removing him to another state where he would not be tempted to go astray in his choice. A fourth mode may, however, be suggested—creating a free-agent without any inclination to evil, or any temptation from external objects. When our author disposes of the second method, by stating that it assumes a constant miracle, as great in the moral as altering the course of the planets hourly would be in the material universe, nothing can be more sound or more satisfactory. But when he argues that our whole happiness consists in a consciousness of freedom of election, and that we should never know happiness were we restrained in any particular, it seems wholly inconceivable how he should have omitted to consider the prodigious comfort of a state in which we should be guaranteed against any error or impropriety of choice; a state in which we should both be unable to go astray and always feel conscious of that security. He, however, begs the question most manifestly in dealing with the two other methods stated, by which undue elections might have been precluded. “You would have freedom,” says he, “without any inclination to sin; but it may justly be doubted if this is possible in the present state of things,” (chap. v. s. 5, sub. 2); and again, in answering the question why God did not remove us into another state where no temptation could seduce us, he says: “It is plain that in the present state of things it is impossible for men to live without natural evils or the danger of sinning.” (Ib.) Now the whole question arises upon the constitution of the present state of things. If that is allowed to be inevitable, or is taken as a datum in the discussion, there ceases to be any question at all.
The doctrine of a chain of being is enlarged upon, and with much felicity of illustration. But it only wraps up the difficulty in other words, without solving it. For then the question becomes this—Why did the Deity create such a chain as could not be filled up without misery? It is, indeed, merely restating the fact of evil existing; for whether we say there is suffering among sentient beings—or the universe consists of beings more or less happy, more or less miserable—or there exists a chain of beings varying in perfection and in felicity—it is manifestly all one proposition. The remark of Bayle upon this view of the subject is really not at all unsound, and is eminently ingenious: “Would you defend a king who should confine all his subjects of a certain age in dungeons, upon the ground that if he did not, many of the cells he had built must remain empty?” The answer of Bishop Law to this remark is by no means satisfactory. He says it assumes that more misery than happiness exists. Now, in this view of the question, the balance is quite immaterial. The existence of any evil at all raises the question as much as the preponderance of evil over good, because the question conceives a perfectly good Being, and asks how such a Being can have permitted any evil at all. Upon this part of the subject both King and Law have fallen into an error which recent discoveries place in a singularly clear light. They say that the argument they are dealing with would lead to leaving the earth to the brutes without human inhabitants. But the recent discoveries in Fossil Osteology have proved that the earth, for ages before the last 5,000 or 6,000 years, was left to the lower animals; nay, that in a still earlier period of its existence no animal life at all was maintained upon its surface. So that, in fact, the foundation is removed of the reductio ad absurdum attempted by the learned prelates.
A singular argument is used towards the latter end of the inquiry. When the Deity, it is said, resolved to create other beings, He must of necessity tolerate imperfect natures in his handiwork, just as he must the equality of a circle’s radii when he drew a circle. Who does not perceive the difference? The meaning of the word circle is that the radii are all equal; this equality is a necessary truth. But it is not shown that men could not exist without the imperfections they labor under. Yet this is the argument suggested by these authors while complaining (chap. v. s. 5, sub. 7, div. 7), that Lactantius had not sufficiently answered the Epicurean dilemma; it is the substitute propounded to supply that father’s deficiency.—“When, therefore,” says the Archbishop, “matter, motion and free-will are constituted, the Deity must necessarily permit corruption of things and the abuse of liberty, or something worse, for these cannot be separated without a contradiction, and God is no more important, because he cannot separate equality of radii from a circle.”—Chap. v. s. 5, subs. 7. If he could not have created evil, he would not have been omnipotent; if he would not, he must let his power lie idle; and rejecting evil have rejected all the good. “Thus,” exclaims the author with triumph and self-complacency, “then vanishes this Herculean argument which induced the Epicureans to discard the good Deity, and the Manicheans to substitute an evil one.” (Ib. subs. 7, sub. fine.) Nor is the explanation rendered more satisfactory, or indeed more intelligible, by the concluding passage of all, in which we are told that “from a conflict of two properties, namely, omnipotence and goodness, evils necessarily arise. These attributes amicably conspire together, and yet restrain and limit each other.” It might have been expected from hence that no evil at all should be found to exist. “There is a kind of struggle and opposition between them, whereof the evils in nature bear the shadow and resemblance. Here, then, and no where else, mar we find the primary and most certain rise and origin of evils.”
Such is this celebrated work; and it may safely be affirmed that a more complete failure to overcome a great and admitted difficulty—a more unsatisfactory solution of an important question—is not to be found in the whole history of metaphysical science.
Among the authors who have treated of this subject, a high place is justly given to Archdeacon Bulguy, whose work on Divine Benevolence is always referred to by Dr. Paley with great commendation. But certain it is that this learned and pious writer either had never formed to himself a very precise notion of the real question under discussion, namely, the compatibility of the appearances which we see and which we consider as evil, with a Being infinitely powerful as well as good; or he had in his mind some opinions respecting the divine nature, opinions of a limitary kind, which he does not state distinctly, although he constantly suffers them to influence his seasonings. Hence, whenever he comes close to the real difficulty he appears to beg the question. A very few instances of what really pervades the whole work will suffice to show how unsatisfactory its general scope is, although it contains, like the treatise of Dr. King and Dr. Law’s Commentary, many valuable observations on the details of the subject.
And first we may perceive that what he terms a “previous remark,” and desires the reader “to carry along through the whole proof of divine benevolence,” really contains a statement that the difficulty is to be evaded and not met. “An intention of producing good,” says he, “will be sufficiently apparent in any particular instance if the thing considered can neither be changed nor taken away without loss or harm, all other things continuing the same. Should you suppose various things in the system changed at once, you can neither judge of the possibility nor the consequences of the changes, having no degree of experience to direct you.” Now assuredly this postulate makes the whole question as easy a one as ever metaphysician or naturalist had to solve. For it is no longer—Why did a powerful and benevolent Being create a world in which there is evil—but only—The world being given, how far are its different arrangements consistent with one another? According to this, the earthquake at Lisbon, Voltaire’s favorite instance, destroyed thousands of persons, because it is in the nature of things that subterraneous vapors should explode, and that when houses fall on human beings they should be killed. Then if Dr. Balguy goes to his other argument, on which he often dwells, that if this nature were altered, we cannot possibly tell whether worse might not ensue; this, too, is assuming a limited power in the Deity, contrary to the hypothesis. It may most justly be said, that if there be any one supposition necessarily excluded from the whole argument, it is the fundamental supposition of the “previous remark,” namely, “all other things continuing the same.”
But see how this assumption pervades and paralyzes the whole argument, rendering it utterly inconclusive. The author is to answer an objection derived from the constitution of our appetites for food, and his reply is, that “we cannot tell how far it was possible for the stomachs and palates of animals to be differently formed, unless by some remedy worse than the disease.” Again, upon the question of pain: “How do we know that it was possible for the uneasy sensation to be confined to particular cases?” So we meet the same fallacy under another form, as evil being the result of “general principles.” But no one has ever pushed this so far as Dr. Balguy, for he says, “that in a government so conducted, many events are likely to happen contrary to the intention of its author.” He now calls in the aid of chance, or accident.—“It is probable,” he says, “that God should be good, for evil is more likely to be accidental than appears from experience in the conduct of men.” Indeed, his fundamental position of the Deity’s benevolence is rested upon this foundation, that “pleasures only were intended, and that the pains are accidental consequences, although the means of producing pleasures.” The same recourse to accident is repeatedly had. Thus, “the events to which we are exposed in this imperfect state appear to be the accidental, not natural, effects of our frame and condition.” Now can any one thing be more manifest than that the very first notion of a wise and powerful Being excludes all such assumptions as things happening contrary to His intention; and that when we use the word chance or accident, which only means our human ignorance of causes, we at once give up the whole question, as if we said, “It is a subject about which we know nothing.” So again as to power. “A good design is more difficult to be executed, and therefore more likely to be executed imperfectly, than an evil one, that is, with a mixture of effects foreign to the design and opposite to it.” This at once assumes the Deity to be powerless. But a general statement is afterwards made more distinctly to the same effect. “Most sure it is that he can do all things possible. But are we in any degree competent judges of the bounds of possibility?” So again under another form nature is introduced as something different from its author, and offering limits to his power. “It is plainly not the method of nature to obtain her ends instantaneously.” Passing over such propositions as that “useless evil is a thing never seen,” (when the whole question is why the same ends were not attained without evil), and a variety of other subordinate assumptions contrary to the hypothesis, we may rest with this general statement, which almost every page of Dr. Balguy’s book bears out, that the question which he has set himself to solve is anything rather than the real one touching the Origin of Evil; and that this attempt at a solution is as ineffectual as any of those which we have been considering.
Is, then, the question wholly incapable of solution, which all these learned and ingenious men have so entirely failed in solving? Must the difficulty remain forever unsurmounted, and only be approached to discover that it is insuperable? Must the subject, of all others the most interesting for us to know well, be to us always as a sealed book, of which we can never know anything? From the nature of the thing—from the question relating to the operation of a power which, to our limited faculties, must ever be incomprehensible—there seems too much reason for believing that nothing precise or satisfactory ever will be attained by human reason regarding this great argument; and that the bounds which limit our views will only be passed when we have quitted the encumbrances of our mortal state, and are permitted to survey those regions beyond the sphere of our present circumscribed existence. The other branch of Natural Theology, that which investigates the evidences of Intelligence and Design, and leads us to a clear apprehension of the Deity’s power and wisdom, is as satisfactorily cultivated as any other department of science, rests upon the same species of proof, and affords results as precise as they are sublime. This branch will never be distinctly known, and will always so disappoint the inquirer as to render the lights of Revelation peculiarly acceptable, although even those lights leave much of it still involved in darkness—still mysterious and obscure.[2]