Sin, then, is not God's work, and we are unable to prove that He ought to have prevented it. Can we go any farther than this? Yes; we can show that the permission of it has been made subservient to the attainment of certain great ends. Man has the power to choose evil, but God has also the power to overrule it--to cause it, as it were, to contradict itself, to work out its own defeat and disgrace, to promote what it threatens to hinder; and the facts of experience and history show us that this is what He does. There is thus developed in His human creatures a higher kind of virtue than that of mere innocence; a virtue which can only be reached through suffering, and conflict, and conquest. The struggle with moral evil, still more than that with physical disadvantages and intellectual difficulties, tests and exercises the soul, teaches it its weakness and dependence on Divine strength, and elicits and trains its spiritual faculties. Successive battles with vice raise honest combatants to successive stages of virtue. The type of character presented to us in the second Adam is no bare restoration of that which was lost in the first Adam, but one immeasurably superior. The humblest of true Christians now aspires after a far grander moral ideal than that of an untested innocence. Is there not in this fact a vindication of God's wisdom and holiness worth more than volumes of abstract speculation? Due weight ought also to be given to the circumstance that the system of God's moral government of our race is only in course of development. We can see but a small part of it, for the rest is as yet unevolved. History is not a whole, but the initial or preliminary portion of a process which may be of vast duration, and the sequel of which may be far grander than the past has been. That portion of the process which has been already accomplished, small though it be, indicates the direction which is being taken; it is, on the whole, a progressive movement; a movement bearing humanity towards truth, freedom, and justice. Is it scientific, or in any wise reasonable, to believe that the process will not advance to its legitimate goal? Surely not. The physical history of the earth affords abundant evidence of the realisation of the most comprehensive plans, and no indication of failure. We can have no right to imagine that it will be otherwise in the moral sphere; that the ideals towards which history shows humanity to have been approaching in the past will not be reached even in the most distant future. But if moral progress will, no less than physical progress, be carried on unto completion, the future cannot fail to throw light on the past--cannot fail to some extent to justify the past. The slowness of the progress may perplex us, and yet, perhaps, it is just what we ought to expect, both from God's greatness and our own littleness. He is patient because eternal. His plans stretch from everlasting to everlasting, and a thousand years are in His sight but