IX.
DISPLAYS OF THE DIVINE BENIGNITY IN HELL.
MAN alone, of all created beings, is endowed with Liberty and Rationality. These are the properly human faculties. Without them he would not be man. These are the faculties which alone render him morally accountable. Without them, he would have been incapable of either sin or holiness; and to have been incapable of these, he must have been something other than man—a very different being from what he is.
Why is not the wolf or the bear morally responsible? Why is every other creature incapable of sin? Simply because man alone is endowed with what belongs to no other creature—a moral sense—the power to discriminate and the liberty to choose between justice and injustice, right and wrong; or in other words, with the faculties of rationality and liberty, which alone distinguish him from the brute creation and make him man.
But the very possession of these faculties involves a responsibility corresponding in magnitude to the dignity and worth of the endowment. It involves, moreover, the liability of their abuse and utter perversion by the
