But see how this assumption pervades and paralyzes the whole argument, rendering it utterly inconclusive. The author is to answer an objection derived from the constitution of our appetites for food, and his reply is, that “we cannot tell how far it was _possible_ for the stomachs and palates of animals to be differently formed, unless by some remedy worse than the disease.” Again, upon the question of pain: “How do we know that it was _possible_ for the uneasy sensation to be confined to particular cases?” So we meet the same fallacy under another form, as evil being the result of “general principles.” But no one has ever pushed this so far as Dr. Balguy, for he says, “that in a government so conducted, many events are likely to happen contrary to the intention of its author.” He now calls in the aid of chance, or accident.--“It is probable,” he says, “that God should be good, for evil is more likely to be _accidental_ than appears from experience in the conduct of men.” Indeed, his fundamental position of the Deity’s benevolence is rested upon this foundation, that “pleasures only were intended, and that the pains are accidental consequences, although the means of producing pleasures.” The same recourse to accident is repeatedly had. Thus, “the events to which we are exposed in this imperfect state appear to be the _accidental_, not natural, effects of our frame and condition.” Now can any one thing be more manifest than that the very first notion of a wise and powerful Being excludes all such assumptions as things happening contrary to His intention; and that when we use the word chance or accident, which only means our human ignorance of causes, we at once give up the whole question, as if we said, “It is a subject about which we know nothing.” So again as to power. “A good design is more _difficult_ to be executed, and therefore more likely to be executed _imperfectly_, than an evil one, that is, with a mixture of effects foreign to the design and opposite to it.” This at once assumes the Deity to be powerless. But a general statement is afterwards made more distinctly to the same effect. “Most sure it is that he can do all things possible. But are we in any degree competent judges of the bounds of possibility?” So again under another form nature is introduced as something different from its author, and offering limits to his power. “It is plainly not the method of nature to obtain her ends instantaneously.” Passing over such propositions as that “_useless_ evil is a thing never seen,” (when the whole question is why the same ends were not attained without evil), and a variety of other subordinate assumptions contrary to the hypothesis, we may rest with this general statement, which almost every page of Dr. Balguy’s book bears out, that the question which he has set himself to solve is anything rather than the real one touching the Origin of Evil; and that this attempt at a solution is as ineffectual as any of those which we have been