ness and Love itself, and who is the "Prinee of Peace." Thus does the whole created universe, spiritual and material, image the Divine Creator; and it images Him, because it is derived from Him; the effect mirrors the cause.
But, on the other hand, as there is nothing evil or hurtful in the Divine nature, it is plain that such things in the material world as are noxious and destructive, have no prototype in Him. They can not, consequently, have been derived from the primary Cause of all things, but from a secondary cause—namely, from evil existences in the moral world or mind, of man. Now, it has been elsewhere shown, that moral evil is not the creation of God, but is the work of man; that it came into existence through the perversion of the order of man's moral nature; which, man, by the freedom necessarily given to him as man, had the power to pervert, and which by an abuse of that freedom he did pervert. Thus evil, in fact, is a perversion of the mental faculties—distortion, so to speak, of the spiritual substances and forms, which constitute the mind. These ugly and fierce mental existences flowing forth into nature, and putting on correspondent material forms, presented to view those noxious and hateful things, animal and vegetable, and mineral also, which astonish and shock us, when beheld in the midst of God's beautiful creation. Then first appeared the deadly cobra, dragging his slimy length noiselessly amongst the flowers. Then first came forth the fierce hyæena, skulking through the dark, as if ashamed to shew his hateful form in God's fair sun-light. Then screeched the owl and the night-hawk, in gloomy and desolate places. Then first were produced and hatched
