Baron Henry Brougham Brougham and Vaux

“ I that we ought to build a great pile in honor of the stars and the pile should be more glorious than all the palaces of the chiefs and the palaces of the king; for are not the stars our masters?
“And thou and I should be the chief dwellers in this new palace, and we would serve the gods of night, and fatten their altars with the choicest of the herd, and the freshest of the fruits of the earth.”
And Darvan said:
“Thou speakest as becomes the servant of the stars. But will the people help to build the pile, for they are a war-like race and they love not toil?” ”

“ Among the multitudes of diverse and opposing religions which afflict mankind, it is self-evident that but one religion may justly claim the inspiration of truth, and it is equally evident to all reasoning minds that that religion is the religion of kindness and humanity,—the religion of noble thoughts and generous deeds,—which removes the enmities of race and creed, and “makes the whole world kin!” And which, in its observance is blessed with sympathy, friendship, happiness and love. ”

“ Now can any one thing be more manifest than that the very first notion of a wise and powerful Being excludes all such assumptions as things happening contrary to His intention; and that when we use the word chance or accident, which only means our human ignorance of causes, we at once give up the whole question, as if we said, “It is a subject about which we know nothing.” So again as to power. “A good design is more difficult to be executed, and therefore more likely to be executed imperfectly, than an evil one, that is, with a mixture of effects foreign to the design and opposite to it.” ”

“ There is something so repugnant to all our feelings, but also to all the conceptions of our reason, in the supposition of such a Being desiring the misery, for its own sake, of the Beings whom he voluntarily called into existence and endowed with a sentient nature, that the mind naturally and irresistibly recoils from such a thought. But this is not all. If the nature of that great Being were evil, his power being unbounded, there would be some proportion between the amounts of ills and the monuments of that power. ”

“ The destinies of men and empires are then portioned forth for the coming year, and, unconsciously to ourselves, our fates become minioned to the stars.
A hushed and solemn night is that in which the dark gates of time open to receive the ghost of the dead year, and the young and radiant stranger rushes forth from the clouded chasms of eternity. On that night, it is said that there are given to the spirits that we see not, a privilege and a power; the dead are troubled in their forgotten graves, and men feast and laugh, while demon and angel are contending for their doom. ”

“ Let the king deny it, if he can!”
Then Voltoch, of the giant limbs, strode forth from the hall, and his spear quivered in his hand.
“Rightly hast thou spoken, base son of my father’s herdsman! and for thy sins shalt thou surely die; for thou liest when thou speakest of thy power with the stars, and thou laughest at the folly of them who hear thee: wherefore put him to death.” ”

“ It is quite true that many reasoners refuse to allow any distinction between the evil produced by natural causes and the evils caused by rational agents, whether as regards their own guilt, or the mischief it caused to others. Those reasoners deny that the creation of man’s will and the endowing it with liberty explains anything; they hold that the creation of a mind whose will is to do evil, amounts to the same thing, and belongs to the same class, with the creation of matter whose nature is to give pain and misery. ”

“ So would the displeasure of the gods of night perchance be incurred. Suffer that the lesser door of the palace be unbarred, so that at the night hour, when the moon is midway in the heavens, I may steal unseen into thy chamber, and mix the liquid with thy wine.”
“So be it,” said the king. “Thou art wise though thy limbs are crooked and curt; and the stars might have chosen a taller man.”
Then the king laughed again; and Morven laughed too, but there was danger in the mirth of the son of Osslah. ”

“ And when the heraldry seemed done, there came a laugh from the abyss of gloom, and half way from the gulf rose the lurid shape of Lucifer, the fiend.
“Thou countest thy flock ill, O radiant shepherd. Behold! one star is missing from the three thousand and ten.”
“Back to thy gulf, false Lucifer!—the throne of thy brother hath been filled.”
And lo! as the archangel spake, the stars beheld a young and all lustrous stranger on the throne of the erring star; and his face was so soft to look upon, that the dimmest of human eyes might have gazed upon its splendor unabashed ”

“ The mere negation in the creating of some, indeed of many, nay, of any conceivable number of desirable attributes, is therefore no proper evidence of evil design or of limited power in the Creator—it is no proof of the existence of evil properly so called. But does not this also erase death from the catalogue of ills? It might well please the Deity to create a mortal being which, consisting of soul and body, was only to live upon this earth for a limited number of years. ”

“ Nothing could be more unphilosophical, nay, more groundless, than such a process of reasoning, if we had only been able to trace design in one or two instances; for instance, if we found only the eye to show proofs of contrivance, it would be wholly gratuitous, when we saw the ear, to assume that it was adapted to the nature of sound, and still more so, if, on examination, we perceived it bore no perceptible relation to the laws of acoustics. The proof of contrivance in one particular is nothing like a proof, nay, does not even furnish the least presumption of contrivance in other particulars ”

“ If they are of infinite power, the supposition of their co-existence involves a contradiction in terms; for the one being in opposition to the other, the power of each must be something taken from that of the other; consequently neither can be of infinite power. If, again, we only suppose both to be of equal power, and always acting against each other, there could be nothing whatever done, neither good or evil; the universe would be at a standstill; or rather no act of creation could ever have been performed, and no existence could be conceived beyond that of the two antagonistic principles. ”

“ Fifthly, this leads us to another and most formidable objection. To conceive the eternal existence of one Being infinite in power, “self-created and creating all others,” is by no means impossible. Indeed, as everything must have had a cause, nothing we see being by possibility self-created, we naturally mount from particulars to generals, until finally we rise to the idea of a first cause, uncreated, and self-existing, and eternal. If the phenomena compels us to affix limits to his goodness, we find it impossible to conceive limits to the power of a creative, eternal, self-existing principle. ”

“ Great as have been our achievements in physical astronomy, we are as yet wholly unable to understand why a power pervades the system acting inversely as the squares of the distance from the point to which it attracts, rather than a power acting according to any other law; and why it has been the pleasure of the almighty Architect of that universe, that the orbits of the planets should be nearly circular instead of approaching to, or being exactly the same with many other trajectories of a nearly similar form, though of other properties ”

“ But admitting on account of the question under discussion, that we have only a right to say that power and skill are prodigiously great, though possibly not boundless, they are plainly shown in the phenomena of the universe to be the attributes of a Being, who, if evil-disposed, could have made the monuments of Ill upon a scale resembling those of Power and Skill; so that if those things which seem to us evil be really the result of a mischievous design in such a Being, we cannot comprehend why they are upon so entirely different a scale. ”

“ King gets over the difficulty and reaches his conclusion by saying, “The Deity could have only one of two objects—his own happiness or that of his creatures.”—The skeptic makes answer, “He might have another object, namely, the misery of his creatures;” and then the whole question is, whether or not he had this other object; or, which is the same thing, whether or not his nature is perfectly good. It must never be forgotten that unless evil exists there is nothing to dispute about—the question falls. The whole difficulty arises from the admission that evil exists, or what we call evil, exists. ”

“ Mere imperfection must altogether be deducted from the account. It never can be contended that any evil nature can be ascribed to the first cause, merely for not having endowed sentient creatures with greater power or wisdom, for not having increased and multiplied the sources of enjoyment, or for not having made those pleasures which we have more exquisitely grateful. No one can be so foolish as to argue that the Deity is either limited in power, or deficient in goodness, because he has chosen to create some beings of a less perfect order than others. ”

“ The fell and thrilling crimes that stalk abroad when the world sleeps—the parricide with his stealthy step, and horrent brow, and lifted knife; the unwifed mother that glides out and looks behind, and behind, and shudders, and casts her babe upon the river, and hears the wail, and pities not—the splash, and does not tremble!
These the starred kings behold—to these they lead the unconscious step; but the guilt blanches not their lustre, neither doth remorse wither their unwrinkled youth. ”

“ Archbishop King divides evil into three kinds—imperfection, natural evil and moral evil—including under the last head all the physical evils that arise from human actions, as well as the evils which consists in the guilt of those actions.
The existence of imperfection is stated to be necessary, because everything which is created and not self-existent must be imperfect; consequently every work of the Deity, in other words, everything but the Deity himself, must have imperfection in its nature. ”

“ Nature, then, resembles the law-giver who, to make his subjects obey, should prefer holding out rewards for compliance with his commands rather than denounce punishments for disobedience. But nature is yet more kind; she is gratuitously kind; she not only prefers inducement to threat or compulsion, but she adds more gratification than was necessary to make us obey her calls. How well might all creation have existed and been continued, though the air had not been balmy in spring, or the shade and the spring refreshing in summer ”

“ Slowly it moved in its huge strength along, and its burning eyes glittered through the gloomy shade: its jaws, falling apart, showed the grinders with which it snapped asunder the young oaks of the forest; and the vast tusks, which, curved downward to the midst of its massive limbs, glistened white and ghastly, curdling the blood of one destined hereafter to be the dreaded ruler of the men of that distant age.
The livid eyes of the monster fastened on the form of the herdsman, even amidst the thick darkness of the pine. ”

“ To say that in some things the good principle prevails and in others the evil, is really saying nothing more than that good exists here and evil there. It does not further the argument one step, nor give anything like an explanation. For it must always be borne in mind that the whole question respecting the Origin of Evil proceeds upon the assumption of a wise, benevolent and powerful Being having created the world. The difficulty, and the only difficulty, is, how to reconcile existing evil with such a Being’s attributes ”

“ The evil which exists, or that which we suppose to be evil, not only is of a kind and a magnitude requiring inconceivably less power and less skill than the admitted good of the creation—it also bears a very small proportion in amount; quite as small a proportion as the cases of unknown or undiscoverable design bear to those of acknowledged and proved contrivance. Generally speaking, the preservation and the happiness of sensitive creatures appears to be the great object of creative exertion and conservative providence. ”

“ If any person, the most deeply skilled in mathematical science, and the most internally convinced of the universal prevalence of design and contrivance in the structure of the universe, had been asked what reason there was for the planets moving in ellipses so, nearly approaching to circles, he could not have given any good reason, at least beyond a guess. ”

“ Then are we not entitled to apply the same reasoning to what at present appears Evil in a system of which, after all we know of it, so much still remains concealed from our view?
The mere act of creation in a Being of wisdom so admirable and power so vast, seems to make it extremely probable that perfect goodness accompanies the exertion of his perfect skill. ”