insentient forms of life feasting on higher and sentient forms; we find
teeth and talons whetted for slaughter, hooks and suckers moulded for
torment--everywhere a reign of terror, hunger, sickness, with oozing
blood and quivering limbs, with gasping breath and eyes of innocence
that dimly close in deaths of cruel torture! Is it said that there are
compensating enjoyments? I care not to strike the balance; the
enjoyments I plainly perceive to be as physically necessary as the
pains, and this whether or not evolution is due to design.... Am I told
that I am not competent to judge the purposes of the Almighty? I answer
that if there are _purposes_, I _am_ able to judge of them so far as I
can see; and if I am expected to judge of His purposes when they appear
to be beneficent, I am in consistency obliged also to judge of them when
they appear to be malevolent. And it can be no possible extenuation of
the latter to point to the "final result" as "order and beauty," so long
as the means adopted by the "_Omnipotent Designer_" are known to have
been so [terrible]. All that we could legitimately assert in this case
would be that, so far as observation can extend, "He cares for animal
perfection" _to the exclusion of_ "animal enjoyment," and even to the
_total disregard_ of animal suffering. But to assert this would merely
be to deny beneficence as an attribute of God[27].'

The reasoning here appears as unassailable as it is obvious. If, as the
writer goes on to say, we see a rabbit panting in the iron jaws of a
spring trap, and in consequence abhor the devilish nature of the being
who, with full powers of realizing what pain means, can deliberately
employ his whole faculties of invention in contriving a thing so
hideously cruel; what are we to think of a Being who, with yet higher
faculties of thought and knowledge, and with an unlimited choice of
means to secure His ends, has contrived untold thousands of mechanisms
no less diabolical? In short, so far as Nature can teach us, or