The suffering which the
conflict involves may indicate that God has made even animals for some
higher end than happiness--that he cares for animal perfection as well as
for animal enjoyment; but it affords no reason for denying that the ends
which the conflict actually serves it was intended to serve."
Now, whatever may be thought of such an argument as an attempted
justification of beneficent design already on independent ground believed
to exist, it is manifestly no argument at all as establishing any
presumption in favour of such design, unless it could be shown that the
Deity is so far limited in his power of adapting means to ends that the
particular method adopted in this case was the best, all things considered,
that he was able to adopt. For supposing the Deity to be, what Professor
Flint maintains that he is--viz., omnipotent--and there can be no inference
more transparent than that such wholesale suffering, for whatever ends
designed, exhibits an incalculably greater deficiency of beneficence in the
divine character than that which we know in any, the very worst, of human
characters. For let us pause for one moment to think of what suffering in
nature means. Some hundreds of millions of years ago some millions of
millions of animals must be supposed to have been sentient. Since that time
till the present, there must have been millions and millions of generations
of millions of millions of individuals.
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