Page:OptimismBlood.djvu/34

not benevolent. If he neither can nor will remove it, he is neither all-powerful nor benevolent. Lastly, if he is both willing and able to annihilate evil, why does it exist?" The learned father answers himself in more modern prolixity, and we think with indifferent satisfaction, by the argument that man has power to choose the good,—and though he choose the evil, God stands unreproached. Few men reproach God with evil intention: conscience restrains them.

We have chiefly desired that it should appear the general conviction of the thoughtful that there is but one God. That they could not account for evil was a conviction which came afterward. We can readily understand how this inability occasioned a proposition that there were powers under God, which created evil, leaving the one God pure; and we are encouraged the more to believe in one God, because in that belief alone can we give evil any rational account. So far from requiring another power to produce the evil of the world, in order to preserve the one God pure, to us the proof of his purity depends entirely on his solitary power.—Grant us but this: that all-knowledge must control all-power,—that all truth is one, and must rest in one omniscience,—in short, that there can be but one free, all-wise, almighty God, and then we shall declare that a single will and purpose are necessary to the harmony, safety and good of the universe,—and from this necessity will grow out others whereby the Gordian knot shall unravel without a stroke of the sword.