Page:God Manifest.djvu/294

 lastly, that the very air we breathe should be sometimes pestiferous, filled with poisonous gases or noxious vapors, dangerous to the health, destructive to the very life, of man.

These things do, indeed, appear at first sight strange and mysterious. But they are not more strange than the existence of painful disease, in its thousand horrid shapes; not more mysterious, than the sufferings of infancy, or the prevalence of the cholera or the plague; nor, indeed, more wonderful than the existence of moral evil itself, the great "spring of all man's woes." But in the preceding Section, we have endeavoured to show that the existence of disease and consequent bodily suffering does not, when rightly viewed, impugn the goodness of the Creator,—for that it is not His work, but man's, being the legitimate effect of moral disease or sin. So, again, in the previous Chapter, we sought to make it plain, that the existence of moral evil, with all its direful consequences, is not, when seen in its true light, a disproof of the Divine Goodness, but an actual confirmation of it. For, as was shown, it was the goodness and love of the Creator which induced Him to make man a free agent, instead of a mere machine or automaton,—for thus alone could man be capable of receiving truly human and heavenly happiness: but that free agency implied the power of turning away from God and so of perverting the proper order of his nature,—which, man, abusing his liberty, unhappily did, and so brought himself into moral disorder, or, in other words, into evil and sin. So, then, the existence of moral evil is a proof of man's free-agency,—and free-agency is, as before said, a proof of God's goodness, for it was intended for man's highest