with the divisibility of matter? Can a few ideas more or less in a brain prevent fire from burning, or a rock from crushing us? Moral evil, upon which so many volumes have been written is, in fact, nothing but natural evil. This moral evil is a sensation of pain occasioned by one organized being to another. Rapine, outrage, etc., are evil only because they produce evil. But as we certainly are unable to do any evil, or occasion any pain to God, it is evident by the light of reason--for faith is altogether a different principle--that in relation to the Supreme Being and as affecting Him, moral evil can have no existence. As the greatest of natural evils is death, the greatest of moral evils is, unquestionably, war. All crimes follow in its train; false and calumnious declarations, perfidious violation of the treaties, pillage, devastation, pain, and death under every hideous and appalling form. All this is physical evil in relation to man, but can no more be considered moral evil in relation to God than the rage of dogs worrying and destroying one another. It is a mere common-place idea, and as false as it is feeble, that men are the only species that slaughter and destroy one another. Wolves, dogs, cats, cocks, quails, all war with their respective species: house spiders devour one another; the male universally fights for the female. This warfare is the result of the laws of nature, of principles in their very blood and essence; all is connected; all is necessary. Nature has granted man about two and twenty years of life, one with another; that is, of a thousand children born in the same month, some of whom have died in their infancy, and the rest lived respectively to the age of thirty, forty, fifty, and even eighty years, or perhaps beyond, the average calculation will allow to each the above-mentioned number of twenty-two years. How can it affect the Deity, whether a man die in battle or of a fever? War destroys fewer human beings than smallpox. The scourge of war is transient, that of smallpox reigns with paramount and permanent fatality throughout the earth, followed by a numerous train of others; and taking into consideration the combined, and nearly regular operation of the various causes which sweep mankind from the stage of life, the allowance of two and twenty years for every individual will be found in general to be tolerably correct.