But not only does moral, but physical evil exist. This is another unquestionable fact, and its existence bears directly on my argument. Many and vain have been the attempts to explain it away. It has been affirmed that pain after all is no such great matter. I strongly suspect that those who have asserted this, have experienced but little of it. It is true that it may ultimately result in good under God’s government, but taken by itself, it is undeniably an evil. Do not frightful sufferings abound? Do not most painful diseases afflict our frames? Is it not possible to suffer terribly from causes quite independent of our own conduct? Is not a great earthquake a terrible calamity to those who suffer from its effects, although it may be attended with beneficial results to those who do not? Pains may be said to be useful warnings; but surely the warning might have been given without the extremity of the suffering. They are also affirmed to be the penalties of ignorance, and this may be partially true: but the ignorance is in a vast majority of cases unavoidable. It is a simple fact, that a great amount of physical suffering exists, the reason of which we are wholly unable to explain. But further: moral evil propagates itself, and inflicts calamities on those who are not implicated in its guilt. Is it not true that men have existed both in the ancient and modern world, whose actions have inflicted the greatest evils on mankind for generation after generation? Can any one doubt that descendants suffer for the sins of remote ancestors, and children for those of their parents? Facts are facts, and they will not become less so by our refusing to look at them. The evil wrought by such a man as Philip II. of Spain, is a fact, and it has extended its baneful influence to our own times. Is not a large portion of the evils under which France has groaned, traceable to the misdeeds of two of her sovereigns? These were quietly sleeping in their graves, when the evils they had occasioned burst on the head of their guiltless successor. But it is needless to quote examples. History is one long succession of them. Whether we like it or not, the old saying is an accurate account of the moral order of the universe as it exists, “Visiting the sins of the fathers on the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me, and showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.” These are facts which the theist equally with the Christian must face, for they exist in the universe of that God, in whose moral perfections both believe. I repeat, therefore, that the only way of escaping from them is by rushing into the far greater difficulties of pantheism or atheism.