Here is a world in which there are countless varieties of life--these varieties in all probability related to each other--all living upon each other--everything devouring something, and in its turn devoured by something else--everywhere claw and beak, hoof and tooth,--everything seeking the life of something else--every drop of water a battle-field, every atom being for some wild beast a jungle--every place a golgotha--and such a world is declared to be the work of the infinitely wise and compassionate. According to your idea, Jehovah prepared a home for his children--first a garden in which they should be tempted and from which they should be driven; then a world filled with briers and thorns and wild and poisonous beasts--a world in which the air should be filled with the enemies of human life--a world in which disease should be contagious, and in which it was impossible to tell, except by actual experiment, the poisonous from the nutritious. And these children were allowed to live in dens and holes and fight their way against monstrous serpents and crouching beasts--were allowed to live in ignorance and fear--to have false ideas of this good and loving God--ideas so false, that they made of him a fiend--ideas so false, that they sacrificed their wives and babes to appease the imaginary wrath of this monster. And this God gave to different nations different ideas of himself, knowing that in consequence of that these nations would meet upon countless fields of death and drain each other's veins. Would it not have been better had the world been so that parents would transmit only their virtues--only their perfections, physical and mental,--allowing their diseases and their vices to perish with them? In my reply to Dr. Field I had asked: Why should God demand a sacrifice from man? Why should the infinite ask anything from the finite? Should the sun beg from the glowworm, and should the momentary spark excite the envy of the source of light? Upon which you remark, "that if the infinite is to make no demands upon the finite, by parity of reasoning, the great and strong should scarcely make them on the weak and small." Can this be called reasoning? Why should the infinite demand a sacrifice from man? In the first place, the infinite is conditionless--the infinite cannot want--the infinite has. A conditioned being may want; but the gratification of a want involves a change of condition. If God be conditionless, he can have no wants--consequently, no human being can gratify the infinite. But you insist that "if the infinite is to make no demands upon the finite, by parity of reasoning, the great and strong should scarcely make them on the weak and small."