The optimism of Leibnitz has been a thousand times misrepresented, not because his Théodicée is obscure, but because the scoffers had never read the system they decried. He was supposed to have maintained that our little globe, taken separately, was the best which could be conceived, and that all the trials and crimes of men were in their own independent nature a good. Voltaire was among the ignorant, and to refute the doctrine that everything was good, he concocted a licentious tale, in which everything is vice, injustice, and misery. His satire has a double flaw. He gives a false representation of human life, and of the optimism of Leibnitz. The world of Leibnitz is not our earth in its present state, but the universe, unlimited in extent, and eternal in duration. The final purpose of the Deity in his stupendous scheme is the best that can be, and the means are the best for their end. The fitness of the several parts can only be estimated in their relation to the whole, and the whole is not creation at any moment of time, but the evolution of the universe from everlasting to everlasting. It would be folly to judge the evils of the hour in their isolation, when they are incidents in an illimitable plan, and have reference to the greatest ultimate good. To show in detail how all the evils we experience are subservient to the best conceivable scheme of the universe, would require that we should know the infinite design of God, that we should be able to picture the infinity of other possible worlds, and to institute a comparison between these infinite infinities. A morsel of flesh, or a splinter of bone, bears an immeasurably larger proportion to our frame than our existing globe to the existing universe, which is itself but a link in the eternal chain, and yet a person ignorant of the human structure would in vain attempt to explain the purpose and fitness of some diminutive fragment of man.[808]