It is quite true that many reasoners refuse to allow any distinction between the evil produced by natural causes and the evils caused by rational agents, whether as regards their own guilt, or the mischief it caused to others. Those reasoners deny that the creation of man’s will and the endowing it with liberty explains anything; they hold that the creation of a mind whose will is to do evil, amounts to the same thing, and belongs to the same class, with the creation of matter whose nature is to give pain and misery. But this position, which involves the doctrine of necessity, must, at the very least, admit of one modification. Where no human agency whatever is interposed, and the calamity comes without any one being to blame for it, the mischief seems a step, and a large step, nearer the creative or the superintending cause, because it is, as far as men go, altogether inevitable. The main tendency of the argument, therefore, is confined to physical evil; and this has always been found the most difficult to account for, that is to reconcile with the government of a perfectly good and powerful Being. It would indeed be very easily explained, and the reconcilement would be readily made, if we were at liberty to suppose matter independent in its existence, and in certain qualities, of the divine control; but this would be to suppose the Deity’s power limited and imperfect, which is just one horn of the Epicurean dilemma, _“Aut vult et non potest;”_ and in assuming this, we do not so much beg the question as wholly give it up and admit we cannot solve the difficulty. Yet obvious as this is, we shall presently see that the reasoners who have undertaken the solution, and especially King and Law, under such phrases as “the nature of things,” and “the laws of the material universe,” have been constantly, through the whole argument, guilty of this _petitio principii_ (begging the question), or rather this abandonment of the whole question, and never more so than at the very moment when they complacently plumed themselves upon having overcome the difficulty.