Professor Flint argues that the "law of over-production," and the consequent struggle for existence, being "the reason why the world is so wonderfully rich in the most varied forms of life," is "a means to an end worthy of Divine Wisdom." "Although involving privation, pain, and conflict, its final result is order and beauty. All the perfections of sentient creatures are represented as due to it. Through it the lion has gained its strength, the deer its speed, and the dog its sagacity. The inference seems natural that these perfections were designed to be attained by it; that this state of struggle was ordained for the sake of the advantages which it is actually seen to produce. The suffering which the conflict involves may indicate that God has made even animals for some higher end than happiness--that he cares for animal perfection as well as for animal enjoyment; but it affords no reason for denying that the ends which the conflict actually serves it was intended to serve." Now, whatever may be thought of such an argument as an attempted justification of beneficent design already on independent ground believed to exist, it is manifestly no argument at all as establishing any presumption in favour of such design, unless it could be shown that the Deity is so far limited in his power of adapting means to ends that the particular method adopted in this case was the best, all things considered, that he was able to adopt. For supposing the Deity to be, what Professor Flint maintains that he is--viz., omnipotent--and there can be no inference more transparent than that such wholesale suffering, for whatever ends designed, exhibits an incalculably greater deficiency of beneficence in the divine character than that which we know in any, the very worst, of human characters. For let us pause for one moment to think of what suffering in nature means. Some hundreds of millions of years ago some millions of millions of animals must be supposed to have been sentient. Since that time till the present, there must have been millions and millions of generations of millions of millions of individuals. And throughout all this period of incalculable duration, this inconceivable host of sentient organisms have been in a state of unceasing battle, dread, ravin, pain. Looking to the outcome, we find that more than half of the species which have survived the ceaseless struggle are parasitic in their habits, lower and insentient forms of life feasting on higher and sentient forms; we find teeth and talons whetted for slaughter, hooks and suckers moulded for torment--everywhere a reign of terror, hunger, and sickness, with oozing blood and quivering limbs, with gasping breath and eyes of innocence that dimly close in deaths of brutal torture! Is it said that there are compensating enjoyments? I care not to strike the balance; the enjoyments I plainly perceive to be as physically necessary as the pains, and this whether or not evolution is due to design.