Having failed to saddle man with responsibility for himself, our opponents would now make him responsible for some "power" outside himself. The simple answer is that man made neither himself nor his powers, and that God made man and the power given to man; therefore God and not man is responsible. Conscience and reason and the "power" are rulers or guides given to man by God. God made these guides or rulers.
These guides must be true guides, or false guides: they must be good or bad.
God is all-knowing, as well as all-powerful. Not only has He power to create at will a true guide or a false guide, but He knows when He creates a guide, and when He bestows that guide upon man, whether it will be a true or a false guide. Therefore, when God created the reason or the conscience and gave it to man, He knew whether the reason or the conscience would guide man right or wrong. If the power made and bestowed by God leads man wrongly, it is leading man as God willed and knew it would lead him. How, then, can God justly blame man for the acts that reason or power "creates"?
God creates a number of good propensities, and a number of evil propensities, packs them up in a bundle and calls them "man." Is the skinful of propensities created and put together by God responsible for the proportion of good and evil powers it comprises?
But then Mr. Chesterton suggests that God puts over the bundle a "power" of control. That power controls man for evil: as God must have known it would. Is the bundle of God's making responsible for the failure of the power God made and sent to manage it? God must have known when He created and put the "power" in control that it would fail.
Tell me now, some wise philosopher, or great divine, or learned logician, which is the man? Is it the good propensities, or the evil propensities, or the power of control? And tell me how can any one or all of these be responsible to the God who invented them, who created them, who joined them together; who made and united them, knowing they would fail?
Here is a grand conception of an "all-wise," "all-powerful," perfectly "just" God, who creates a man whom He knows must do evil, gives him a guide who cannot make him do well, issues commands for him to act as God has made it impossible for him to act, and finally punishes him for failing to do what God knew from the first he was incapable of doing.
And the world is paying millions of money, and bestowing honours and rewards in profusion upon the learned and wise and spiritual leaders who teach it to believe such illogical nonsense as the above.
When we turn from the old idea of instantaneous creation to the new idea of evolution, the theories about "God's mercy" and "God's wrath" are still more impossible and absurd.
For now we are to believe that God, the "First Great Cause," "in the beginning" created not man and beast, and forest and sea, and hill and plain, but "matter," and "force," and "law."