seemingly excluded from the government of His creation; and, if not thus excluded, how is He related to the sin and misery which it contains? That the apparent manner of His relations to the creation should be what it is, results, he thinks, from our relative knowledge, which can never rise superior to the condition of time. In reality, this pre-established harmony is a revelation of the Divine perfection in a scheme of Optimism. Every possible universe was, from eternity, conceived in the mind of God. One of these only can be translated from possible into actual existence, and that one must be the best. There is, indeed, included in it moral and natural evil,—the latter the harmonious consequent of the former, and a reaction against it. But moral evil cannot be separated from the best of possible universes, and the will of God is not the fountain of necessary truths. The mystery of sin is not to be explained by the resolution of evil into good, for sin is essentially evil. But sin is necessarily involved in the idea of this best of possible universes, which, notwithstanding its evil, it is better to translate out of the possible into the actual, than to have no universe at all. Thus, the created universe must be the harmony of one great Theocracy, expressive of the attributes of the one Perfect Being. From His eternal throne, its several streams of elementary existence must have taken their rise. They have flowed, and they must continue to flow, in the courses into which he sent them in the beginning; and, notwithstanding the dark shades in which so many of them are enveloped, they are recognised by His Omniscience as the only possible and
