On the whole; consider that I speak only of probabilities.  There is a depth in this abyss of thought, which no human plummet is long enough to sound; there is a maze in this labyrinth to be tracked by no mortal clue.  It involves the truth, How unsearchable are his judgments:  Thou hidest thy ways in the sea, and thy paths in the deep waters, and thy footsteps are not known.  The weak point of man’s argument lies in the suggested recollection, that doubtless the Deity could, if He would, have upheld all the universe from falling by his gracious power; and that the attribute of love concludes that so He would.  However, these three brief considerations further will go some way to solve the difficulty, and to strengthen the weak point; first, there are other attributes besides love to run concurrently with it, as truth, justice, and unchangeableness:—­Secondly, that grace is not grace, if manifested indiscriminately to all:  and thirdly, that to our understanding at least there was no possible method of illustrating the amiabilities of Goodness, and the contrivances of Wisdom, but by the infused permission of some physical and moral evils:  Mercy, benevolence, design, would in a universe of best have nothing to do; that universe itself would grow stagnant, as incapable of progress; and the principal record of God’s excellences, the book of redemption, would have been unwritten.  Is not then the existence of evil justified in reason’s calculation? and was not such existence an antecedent probability?

Of these matters, thus curtly:  it is time, in a short recapitulation, to reflect, that, from foregoing causes, mysteries were probable around the throne of heaven:  and, as I have attempted to show, the mystery of imperfection, a concrete not an abstract, was likely to have sprung out of any creature universe.  Reason perceives that a Gordion knot was likely to have become entangled; in the intricate complexities of abounding good to be mingled needfully with its own deficiencies, corruptions, and perversions:  and this having been shown by Reason as anteriorly probable, its difficult involvements are now since cut by the sword of conquering Faith.

COSMOGONY.

These deep themes having been descanted on, however from their nature unsatisfactorily and with whatever human weakness, let us now endeavour mentally to transport ourselves to a period immediately antecedent to our own world’s birth.  We should then have been made aware that a great event was about to take place; whereat, from its foreseen consequences, the hierarchies of heaven would be prompt to shout for joy, and the holy ones of God to sing for gratitude.  It was no common case of a creation; no merely onemore orb, of third-rate unimportance, amongst the million others of higher and more glorious praise:  but it was a globe and a race about to be unique in character and fate, and in the far-spread results of their existence.