In regard to those who are the educators of the young, each must strive to maintain that invariable steadiness in governments which is so effective in forming virtuous habits and in rendering obedience to the laws of God more and more easy.
Finally, it should be the aim of each to establish such a community around all who are being trained to virtue, that every social influence shall repress vice and encourage virtue.
Next, we are to consider the great question in reference to the Creator. What then must God do to save our race from sin and its miseries? What would reason and experience teach us to expect he would do to secure obedience to his laws?
In answering this question we must again refer to the causes which experience has shown to be most effective, for we can conceive of no other. We have examined the evidence that the Creator has given to each of his children such a constitution of mind and body, and such circumstances of temptation and trial as is best on the whole, as a part of an infinite system whose results are to develop through eternity. At the same time it has been shown that God is limited, by the eternal nature of things, to a course in which some evil must exist, so that all that is requisite to his character as perfectly benevolent, is that this evil should be reduced by him to its least possible amount.
To suppose that God can impart at creation of each mind all the knowledge of the millions of rules needed [pg 190] for all the myriads of new relations, of myriads of beings through all eternity, is to suppose an impossibility in the nature of things.
If it be maintained that the Creator is not thus limited by the nature of things, but, as theologians teach, could make mind perfect in all needed knowledge as in all other respects, at the first, then we have the greater contradiction involved in the fact, that a perfectly benevolent being chose for his children ignorance and sin in preference to knowledge and virtue.
To say that it may be best to create minds destitute of all needed knowledge when the want insures infinite wrong and suffering, and when there is power to create the knowledge that would insure perfect happiness, is simply a direct contradiction. It is saying that less happiness may be greater than greater happiness. For by “what is for the best” we understand “that which secures the most happiness.” And saying that making misery where there is power to make happiness in its place, is best, means nothing else but the assertion above, that less happiness is greater than greater happiness; or that less is more than most, which is a contradiction, inconceivable and absurd, so that no mind can either comprehend or believe it.
Now, every theologian of every school and of every sect maintains that “God does all things for the best.” Every one who believes in a benevolent Creator does the same. This is simply saying that God does the best possible; that is to say, there is no power that can make a better system than God has made, or administer it with more wisdom or benevolence. He has chosen the best possible and so he can not do any better.
These things being granted, the teachings of experience would lead us to suppose, still farther, that the Creator must do all that is possible to maintain invariable steadiness of government. We can see that this, which is so important in family government, must be still more so in an infinite family. For this end, the natural penalties for wrong doing, must be as invariable as the rewards for well doing.
Again, the Creator must instruct his creatures in his laws and their rewards and penalties to the full extent of his power. That is to say, he must provide well-trained educators of mind, as fast and as fully as is possible in the nature of things, having in view the results of eternal ages to guide his decisions.