I shall not attempt to enter on so profound a question as the origin of evil, and how its existence is consistent with the perfection of a holy God. It is a subject quite beyond the issue before us, and lies not at the foundations of Christianity, but of theism, the truth of which is taken for granted in the objections which the author adduces against the popular view of the scriptural account; for if there is no God the objections are valueless. Still he ought to have informed his readers that it is urged as a partial explanation of those difficulties by the defenders of Christianity, that it is highly probable that the creation of a moral being possessed of free agency, but who at the same time is not capable of sinking into a state of moral degradation, involves as great a contradiction as the conception of a circle which should possess the property of concavity and not of convexity. No rational man believes that it is within the compass, even of omnipotence, to work contradictions. If this be so, it follows that the possibility of the existence of moral evil is a necessary condition of the existence of free agency. The production of a free moral agent capable of yielding a willing obedience to the moral law is a more glorious work than anything in the material universe, even than that universe itself. It might, therefore, have been the good pleasure of the wise, holy, and benevolent Creator to create free moral agents, even if it involved the existence of moral evil. I am far from propounding this as a complete solution of the difficulty, but when it is thus used unsparingly against Christianity, it would have been only candid to have told the reader that it bore with equal weight against every form of theism, and to have given the partial explanation which has been propounded by theologians.