And what is pestilence, or crime,
Or death, O righteous God, to Thee?[173]


We have only to put this poetry into common prose to obtain this
argument, namely,--The presence of evil in the world is not compatible
with the idea of the goodness of God. Here is the objection in all its
force. And what is the answer? Simply this, that God did not create
evil. It was not He who brought crime into the world. He created
liberty, which is a good, and evil is the produce of created liberty in
rebellion against the law of its being. I borrow from Jean-Jacques
Rousseau the development of this thought. "If man," says he, "is a free
agent, then he acts of himself; whatever he does freely enters not into
the ordained system of Providence, and cannot be imputed to it. The
Creator does not will the evil which man does, in abusing the liberty
which He gives him. He has made him free in order that he may do not
evil but good by choice. To murmur because God does not hinder him from
doing evil, is to murmur because He made him of an excellent nature,
attached to his actions the moral character which ennobles them, and
gave him a right to virtue. What! in order to prevent man from being
wicked, must he needs be confined to instinct and made a mere brute? No;
God of my soul, never will I reproach Thee with having made it in Thine
image, in order that I might be free, good, and happy, like Thyself.

"It is the abuse of our faculties which renders us unhappy and wicked.
Our vexations and our cares come to us from ourselves."

Such is Rousseau's answer to the objection drawn from the existence of
evil. It is a good one. It is so good that it is impossible to find a
better. If we are determined not to outrage the human conscience by