Common Sense Applied to Religion; Or, The Bible and the People

by Catharine Esther Beecher

But it can be clearly shown that every person who maintains that there is a Creator who is "perfect" in wisdom and benevolence, does, by this assertion, maintain that very limitation to which the objection is made. This is shown by means of accurate definitions.

Thus "perfect wisdom is that which adapts the best possible means to the best possible ends."

"Perfect benevolence is that which produces the greatest possible good with the least possible evil."

That is to say, a Creator who is perfect in wisdom and goodness has done the best that possibly can be done for the great universe of mind in all its infinite and eternal relations. This being so, certainly "He has no power to do better."

The only way this is evaded is by using different words that mean the same thing, and then refusing to define these words, or to accept exact definitions of them from others.

The infidel, who allows a God of perfect goodness and wisdom, and the strict Calvinist, who is shocked at hearing that God "has no power" to make a better system, or one that has less of evil, say the very same thing themselves, only in more vague and misty modes of expression. They, therefore, are precluded from objecting to positions that involve such a limitation, when it is the very one which they themselves assume.

To affirm that almighty power can make black white and yet black at the same time, or a straight line crooked and still straight, even the strictest upholders of the extent of almighty power would hesitate to affirm, because they are contradictions and absurdities. But they teach equal contradictions who claim that a mind can be created with knowledge, habits, and experience, when it has had neither instruction, training, or experience.

Instead of claiming these absurdities as included in our ideas of this attribute of Deity, we are rather to assume that by almighty power is signified "a power to do all things except contradictions and absurdities."

Thus has been presented what is claimed as the evidence in the Bible in favor of a depraved mental constitution in the human race, and it is maintained that it amounts to nothing at all.

This being so, then we appeal to the principle of reason and common sense (p. 25), "that nothing is to be assumed as true unless there is some evidence that it is so."