Page:Toleration and other essays.djvu/132

108 demn our brethren to frightful torments for small causes. When God is so merciful as to forgive an abominable murder, we may imitate him. The objection is raised that the same God who pardons a cruel murderer damns all men for ever for the transgression of Adam, whose only crime was to eat the forbidden fruit. To our feeble human reason it seems unjust for God to punish eternally all the children of the guilty, not indeed to atone for a murder, but to expiate what seems an excusable act of disobedience. This is said to be an intolerable contradiction, which we cannot admit in an infinitely good being; but it is only an apparent contradiction. God hands us over, with our parents and children, to the flames for the disobedience of Adam; but four thousand years afterwards he sends Jesus Christ to deliver us, and he preserves the life of Cain in order to people the earth: thus he remains in all things the God of justice and mercy. St. Augustine calls Adam's sin a "fortunate fault"; but that of Cain was still more fortunate, since God took care himself to put a mark of his protection on him.

"A window shalt thou make to the ark, and in a cubit shalt thou finish it above," etc. (Gen., vi. 16).

Here we reach the greatest of all miracles, before which reason must humble itself and the heart must break. We know with what bold contempt the incredulous rise against the prodigy of a universal deluge.

It is fruitless for them to object that in the wettest years we do not get thirty inches of rain; that even in such a year there are as many regions with-