Therefore all I am concerned with is to show, that if such a state of things is due to "omnipotent design," the omnipotent designer must be concluded, so far as reason can infer, to be non-beneficent. And this it is not difficult to show. When I see a rabbit panting in the iron jaws of a spring-trap, I abhor the devilish nature of the being who, with full powers of realising what pain means, can deliberately employ his noble faculties of invention in contriving a thing so hideously cruel. But if I could believe that there is a being who, with yet higher faculties of thought and knowledge, and with an unlimited choice of means to secure his ends, has contrived untold thousands of mechanisms no less diabolical than a spring-trap; I should call that being a fiend, were all the world besides to call him God. Am I told that this is arrogance? It is nothing of the kind; it is plain morality, and to say otherwise would be to hide our eyes from murder because we dread the Murderer. Am I told that I am not competent to judge the purposes of the Almighty? I answer that if these are _purposes_, I _am_ able to judge of them so far as I can see; and if I am expected to judge of his purposes when they appear to be beneficent, I am in consistency obliged also to judge of them when they appear to be malevolent. And it can be no possible extenuation of the latter to point to the "final result" as "order and beauty," so long as the means adopted by the "_Omnipotent_ Designer" are known to have been so revolting. All that we could legitimately assert in this case would be, that so far as observation can extend, "he cares for animal perfection" _to the exclusion of_ "animal enjoyment," and even to the _total disregard_ of animal suffering. But to assert this would merely be to deny beneficence as an attribute of God. The dilemma, therefore, which Epicurus has stated with great lucidity, and which Professor Flint quotes, appears to me so obvious as scarcely to require statement. The dilemma is, that, looking to the facts of organic nature, theists must abandon their belief, either in the divine omnipotence, or in the divine beneficence. And yet, such is the warping effect of preformed beliefs on the mind, that even so candid a writer as Professor Flint can thus write of this most obvious truth:-- "The late Mr. John Stuart Mill, for no better reason than that nature sometimes drowns men and burns them, and that childbirth is a painful process, maintained that God could not possibly be infinite. I shall not say what I think of the shallowness and self-conceit displayed by such an argument. What it proves is not the finiteness of God, but the littleness of man. The mind of man never shows itself so small as when it tries to measure the attributes and limit the greatness of its Creator."