That faith he ordinarily yields; he sees it is justified by
those proofs of the great truth he can appreciate, and which he will
not allow to be controlled by the difficulties his conscious feebleness
cannot solve; and the rather, that he sees that if he does not
accept that evidence, he has equally incomprehensible difficulties to
encounter, and two or three stark contradictions into the bargain. His
reason, therefore, triumphs in the proofs, and his faith triumphs over
the difficulties.
It is the same with the doctrine of the Divine government of the world.
In ordinary states of mind man counts it an absurdity to suppose
that the Deity would have created a world to abandon it; that, having
employed wisdom and power so vast in its construction, he would leave
it to be the sport of chance. He feels that the intuitions of right and
wrong; the voice of conscience; satisfaction in well-doing; remorse for
crime; the present tendency, at least, of the laws of the universe,--all
point to the same conclusion, while their imperfect fulfilment equally
points to a future and more accurate adjustment. Yet let the man look
exclusively for awhile on the opposite side of the tapestry; let him
brood over any of the facts which seem at war with the above conclusion;
on some signal triumph of baseness and malignity; on oppressed virtue,
on triumphant vice; on 'the wicked spreading himself like a green bay
tree;' and especially on the mournfull and inscrutable mystery of the
'Origin of Evil,' and he feels that 'clouds and darkness' envelope the
administration of the Moral Governor, though 'justice and judgment are
the habitation of his throne.
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