It is certain that many persons, led away by the authority of a great name, have been accustomed to regard this work as a text-book, and have appealed to Archbishop King and his learned commentator as having solved the question. So many men have referred to the _Principia_ as showing the motions of the heavenly bodies, who never read, or indeed could read, a page of that immortal work. But no man ever did open it who could read it and find himself disappointed in any one particular; the whole demonstration is perfect; not a link is wanting; nothing is assumed. How different the case here! We open the work of the prelate and find it from the first to last a chain of gratuitous assumptions, and, of the main point, nothing whatever is either proved or explained. Evil arises, he says, from the nature of matter. Who doubts it? But is not the whole question why matter was created with such properties as of necessity to produce evil? It was impossible, says he, to avoid it consistently with the laws of motion and matter. Unquestionably; but the whole dispute is upon those laws. If indeed the laws of nature, the existing constitution of the material world, were assumed as necessary, and as binding upon the Deity, how is it possible that any question ever could have been raised? The Deity having the power to make those laws, to endow matter with that constitution, and having also the power to make different laws and to give matter another constitution, the whole question is, how his choosing to create the present existing order of things--the laws and the constitution which we find to prevail--can be reconciled with perfect goodness. The whole argument of the Archbishop assumes that matter and its laws are independent of the Deity; and the only conclusion to which the inquiry leads us is that the Creator has made a world with as little of evil in it as the nature of things,--that is, as the laws of nature and matter--allowed him; which is nonsense, if those laws were made by him, and leaves the question where it was, or rather solves it by giving up the omnipotence of the Creator, if these laws were binding upon him. It must be added, however, that Dr. King and Dr. Law are not singular in pursuing this most inconclusive course of reasoning.