The mere act of creation in a Being of wisdom so admirable and power so vast, seems to make it extremely probable that perfect goodness accompanies the exertion of his perfect skill. There is something so repugnant to all our feelings, but also to all the conceptions of our reason, in the supposition of such a Being desiring the misery, for its own sake, of the Beings whom he voluntarily called into existence and endowed with a sentient nature, that the mind naturally and irresistibly recoils from such a thought. But this is not all. If the nature of that great Being were evil, his power being unbounded, there would be some proportion between the amounts of ills and the monuments of that power. Yet we are struck dumb with the immensity of His works to which no imperfection can be ascribed, and in which no evil can be traced, while the amount of mischief that we see might sink into a most insignificant space; and is such as a being of inconsiderable power and very limited skill could easily have accomplished. This is not the same consideration with the balance of good against evil; and inquirers do not seem to have sufficiently attended to it. The argument, however, deserves much attention, for it is purely and strictly inductive. The divine nature is shown to be clothed with prodigious power and incomparable wisdom and skill,--power and skill so vast and so exceeding our comprehension that we ordinarily term them infinite, and are only inclined to conceive the possibility of limiting, by the course of the argument upon evil, one alternative of which is assumed to raise an exception. But admitting on account of the question under discussion, that we have only a right to say that power and skill are prodigiously great, though possibly not boundless, they are plainly shown in the phenomena of the universe to be the attributes of a Being, who, if evil-disposed, could have made the monuments of Ill upon a scale resembling those of Power and Skill; so that if those things which seem to us evil be really the result of a mischievous design in such a Being, we cannot comprehend why they are upon so entirely different a scale. This is a strong presumption from the facts that we are wrong in imputing those appearances to such a disposition. If so, what seems evil must needs be capable of some other explanation consistent with divine goodness--that is to say, would not prove to be evil at all if we knew the whole of those facts.