Creator are necessary. All the duties of man, and consequently all his happiness present and future, are founded on the relations subsisting between God and him: to understand those relations, a knowledge of both the natures between which those relations subsist is necessary: without a perfect knowledge of both those natures, man could never know the extent of the gratitude due from him to Divine Goodness, and his subjection to Divine Power. To comprehend such vast subjects as the nature of God and man, requires a great accumulation of facts illustrative of both; and the intellectual faculties of man to be greatly invigorated, in order to make right general inductions from those facts.

The human mind cannot conceive any thing so fitted to develope, to exercise, and consequently to invigorate its faculties, as the arts and sciences: now every art and

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science that ever exercised the mind, or dignified human nature, is immediately or remotely the production of evil. This will perhaps be more readily perceptible, when we consider that every art of any consequence to man depends more or less on his use of the element of fire. By his knowledge of the ignitible property of matter, man asserts his delegated dominion over the three kingdoms of nature and nothing but physical necessity, which is another name for evil, has ever driven man to the use of this property *.

* The ancients seem to have preserved, in the story of Prometheus, an allegorical tradition that man attained a knowledge of the use of fire by the necessary consequences of an act which he committed contrary to the command of God; and that God, to punish his disobedience, afflicted the world with physical evil. They appear to have substituted one of the most important consequences (the use of fire) of the act, for the act itself. As man attained the use of fire by an act committed contrary to the command, and of course pre

Almost all the arts which exercise the

human mind, or decorate human life,

:

de

pend on man's use of the metals and nothing but physical evil sends man into the caverns of the earth in search of them; nor could they be of any use to him, without his knowledge of fire. Without fire, man's view of the wonders of nature would never have been extended by the telescope or microscope.

To evil we are indebted for the fine as well as the useful arts: evil has furnished the materials of the greatest productions of

sumed to be contrary to the intention and desire, of God, Prometheus is said to haye stolen fire from heaven. Audax Iapeti genus

Ignem fraude mala gentibus intulit:

Post ignem ætheriâ domo

Subductum, macies, et nova febrium

Terris incubuit cohors;

Semotique prius tarda necessitas

Lethi corripuit gradum."

Hor. lib. i. O. 3.

the human mind—of the Iliad, Æneid, Pa ̧ radise Lost; in short, of every great poem, epic, dramatic, elegiac, or satiric, that ever was written.

Musical instruments, unless of the rudest kind, could never have been made without the metals.

To evil endured at present, or apprehended in future, we are indebted for architecture, considered either as a useful or a "fine art, in all its stages, from the hut of the savage to "the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, and the cloud-capt towers." Without physical evil then, the world would have been unadorned by the splendid architectural monuments of antiquity; and if moral evil had never existed to mutilate and deface them, we should never have had Madame de Stael's reflections on their ruins *.

* Vide Corinne ou l'Italie.

Sculpture owes its origin to the wish of men to preserve the similitudes of those who had done eminent services to them, and those services must have been the removal of some evil. It could not have reached more than its rudest stage without the use of fire; and the actual suffering of evil is the subject of some of its noblest speeimens the Laocoon, the Niobe, the Dying Gladiator, &c.

Painting owes its existence to evil no less than the other fine arts, though it does not seem so immediately to do so. Were it not for evil, man would never have had canvas, metal, smooth boards, or wall to paint on ; and there are, I believe, no colours that do not require some preparation of fire. Nor would man have ever had any subject for the highest department of the art, which is of a moral nature, had not evil existed. I do not believe that without evil we should