Such considerations as have now been indicated are sufficient to show that suffering is a means to ends which only a benevolent Being can be conceived of as designing. They show that pain and death are not what they would have been if a malevolent Being had contrived them; that they are characterised by peculiarities which only love and mercy can explain. We do not need for any practical spiritual purpose to know more than this. An objector may still ask, Could not God have attained all good ends without employing any painful means? He may still confront us with the Epicurean dilemma: "The Deity is either willing to take away all evil, but is not able to do so, in which case He is not omnipotent; or He is able to remove the evil, but is not willing, in which case He is not benevolent; or He is neither willing nor able, which is a denial of the Divine perfections; or He is both able and willing to do away with the evil, and yet it exists." But only superficial and immature minds will attach much weight to questionings and reasonings of this kind. A slight tincture of inductive science will suffice to make any man aware that speculations as to what God can or can not do, as to what the universe might or might not have been, belong to a very different region from investigations into the tendencies of real facts and processes. It would seem as if, with our present faculties, these speculations could lead us to no reliable conclusions. We clearly perceive that pain and death serve many good ends; but we should require a knowledge of God and of the universe far beyond that which we possess, to be able to state, even as an intelligent conjecture, that these evils could be wisely dispensed with, or that there is anything in them in the least inconsistent either with the power or the benevolence of God.[45] [45] See Appendix XXXIV.