With Cardinal Newman, one of the glories of our age, Hâjî Abdû finds “the Light of the world nothing else than the Prophet’s scroll, full of lamentations and mourning and woe.” I cannot refrain from quoting all this fine passage, if it be only for the sake of its lame and shallow deduction. “To consider the world in its length and breadth, its various history and the many races of men, their starts, their fortunes, their mutual alienation, their conflicts, and then their ways, habits, governments, forms of worship; their enterprises, their aimless courses, their random achievements and acquirements, the impotent conclusion of long-standing facts, the tokens so faint and broken of a superintending design, the blind evolution (!) of what turn out to be great powers or truths, the progress of things as if from unreasoning elements, not towards final causes; the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims and short duration. the curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion, that condition of the whole race so fearfully yet exactly described in the Apostle’s words, ‘having no hope and without God in the world’—_all this is a vision to dizzy and appall, and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery which is absolutely without human solution_.” Hence that admirable writer postulates some “terrible original calamity”; and thus the hateful doctrine, theologically called “original sin,” becomes to him almost as certain as that “the world exists, and as the existence of God.” Similarly the “Schedule of Doctrines” of the most liberal Christian Church insists upon the human depravity, and the “absolute need of the Holy Spirit’s agency in man’s regeneration and sanctification.” But what have we here? The “original calamity” was either caused by God or arose without leave of God, in either case degrading God to man. It is the old dilemma whose horns are the irreconcilable attributes of goodness and omniscience in the supposed Creator of sin and suffering. If the one quality be predicable, the other cannot be predicable of the same subject. Far better and wiser is the essayist’s poetical explanation now apparently despised because it was the fashionable doctrine of the sage bard’s day:— All nature is but art . . . All discord harmony not understood; All partial evil universal good.—(Essay 289–292.)