The great have wants. The strong are often in need, in peril, and the great and strong often need the services of the small and weak. It was the mouse that freed the lion. England is a great and powerful nation--yet she may need the assistance of the weakest of her citizens. The world is filled with illustrations. The lack of logic is in this: The infinite cannot want anything; the strong and the great may, and as a fact always do. The great and the strong cannot help the infinite--they can help the small and the weak, and the small and the weak can often help the great and strong. You ask: "Why then should the father make demands of love, obedience, and sacrifice from his young child?" No sensible father ever demanded love from his child. Every civilized father knows that love rises like the perfume from a flower. You cannot command it by simple authority. It cannot obey. A father demands obedience from a child for the good of the child and for the good of himself. But suppose the father to be infinite--why should the child sacrifice anything for him? But it may be that you answer all these questions, all these difficulties, by admitting, as you have in your Remarks, "that these problems are insoluble by our understanding." Why, then, do you accept them? Why do you defend that which you cannot understand? Why does your reason volunteer as a soldier under the flag of the incomprehensible? I asked of Dr. Field, and I ask again, this question: Why should an infinitely wise and powerful God destroy the good and preserve the vile? What do I mean by this question? Simply this: The earthquake, the lightning, the pestilence, are no respecters of persons. The vile are not always destroyed, the good are not always saved. I asked: Why should God treat all alike in this world, and in another make an infinite difference? This, I suppose, is "insoluble to our understanding." Why should Jehovah allow his worshipers, his adorers, to be destroyed by his enemies? Can you by any possibility answer this question? You may account for all these inconsistencies, these cruel contradictions, as John Wesley accounted for earthquakes when he insisted that they were produced by the wickedness of men, and that the only way to prevent them was for everybody to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. And you may have some way of showing that Mr. Wesley's idea is entirely consistent with the theories of Mr. Darwin. You seem to think that as long as there is more goodness than evil in the world--as long as there is more joy than sadness--we are compelled to infer that the author of the world is infinitely good, powerful, and wise, and that as long as a majority are out of gutters and prisons, the "divine scheme" is a success. According to this system of logic, if there were a few more unfortunates--if there was just a little more evil than good--then we would be driven to acknowledge that the world was created by an infinitely malevolent being.