Nature, as red in tooth and claw with ravin, is thus without question a large and general fact that must be considered by any theory of teleology which can be propounded.  I do not think that this aspect of the matter could be conveyed in stronger terms than it is by ‘Physicus[26],’ whom I shall therefore quote:—­

’Supposing the Deity to be, what Professor Flint maintains that he is—­viz. omnipotent, and there can be no inference more transparent than that such wholesale suffering, for whatever ends designed, exhibits an incalculably greater deficiency of beneficence in the divine character than that which we know in any, the very worst, of human characters.  For let us pause for one moment to think of what suffering in Nature means.  Some hundreds of millions of years ago some millions of millions of animals must be supposed to have become sentient.  Since that time till the present, there must have been millions and millions of generations of millions and millions of individuals.  And throughout all this period of incalculable duration, this inconceivable host of sentient organisms have been in a state of unceasing battle, dread, ravin, pain.  Looking to the outcome, we find that more than one half of the species which have survived the ceaseless struggle are parasitic in their habits, lower and insentient forms of life feasting on higher and sentient forms; we find teeth and talons whetted for slaughter, hooks and suckers moulded for torment—­everywhere a reign of terror, hunger, sickness, with oozing blood and quivering limbs, with gasping breath and eyes of innocence that dimly close in deaths of cruel torture!  Is it said that there are compensating enjoyments?  I care not to strike the balance; the enjoyments I plainly perceive to be as physically necessary as the pains, and this whether or not evolution is due to design....  Am I told that I am not competent to judge the purposes of the Almighty?  I answer that if there are purposes, I am able to judge of them so far as I can see; and if I am expected to judge of His purposes when they appear to be beneficent, I am in consistency obliged also to judge of them when they appear to be malevolent.  And it can be no possible extenuation of the latter to point to the “final result” as “order and beauty,” so long as the means adopted by the “Omnipotent Designer” are known to have been so [terrible].  All that we could legitimately assert in this case would be that, so far as observation can extend, “He cares for animal perfection” to the exclusion of “animal enjoyment,” and even to the total disregard of animal suffering.  But to assert this would merely be to deny beneficence as an attribute of God[27].’