It is truly surprising how rational and pious men can resort to the reasoning of infidels. When we admit the Omnipotence, we are bound likewise to admit the Omniscience of the Deity; and presumptuous indeed must that man be who overlooks the contractedness of his own intellectual vision, or asserts that, because he cannot see a reason for a supernatural interference, none therefore can exist in the eye of the Supreme.
The objects of God are inscrutable: an appearance of the departed upon earth may have consequences which none—not even those who are affected by it,—can either discover or suppose.[[25]] Can any human wisdom presume to divine—why man was originally created at all? why one man is cut short in high-blooming health and youth, and another lingers long in age and decrepitude? why the best of men are frequently the most unfortunate, and the greatest villains the most prosperous? why the heinous criminal escapes in triumph, and the innocent being is destroyed by torture? And is the production of a supernatural appearance, for the inscrutable purposes of God, more extraordinary, or less credible, than these other ordinations of the Deity, or than all those unaccountable phenomena of nature, which are only, as the rising and setting sun, disregarded by common minds from the frequency of their occurrence?
[25]. Nothing in print places my theory in so distinct, clear, and pleasing a point of view as Parnell’s Hermit,—a strong, moral, and impressive tale,—beautiful in poetry, and abounding in instruction. There the Omniscience of God is exemplified by human incidents, and the mysterious causes of his actions brought home to the commonest capacity. The moral of that short and simple tale says more than a hundred volumes of dogmatic controversies!—The following couplets appear to me extremely impressive:—
The Maker justly claims that world he made:
In this the right of Providence is laid:
Its sacred majesty, through all, depends
On using second means to work its ends.
What strange events can strike with more surprise
Than those which lately struck thy wondering eyes?