TO LEWIS CAMPBELI, Esq.

                                                                    Trin. Coll., 20th Feb. 1853.

After Chapel I was at Litchfield's, where he, Farrar, Pomeroy, and Blakiston, discussed eternal punishment from 8   to 12. Men fall into absurdity as soon as they have settled for themselves the question of the origin of evil. A man   whose mind is "remade up" on that subject is contradictory  on every other; one day he says that the man   that can be happy in such a world is a brute, and the next day that if a man is not happy here he is a moping fool.
At last they assert the Cretan dilemma, that if a man says that man is ignorant and foolish, it was ignorant and   foolish to say so. Solomon, they say, was used up when he wrote Ecclesiastes, and said "all is vanity" in a relative  sense, having himself been so. Solomon describes the search after Happiness for its own sake and for the sake of  possession. It is as if a strong man should collect into his house all the beauty of the world, and be condemned to  look out of the window and marvel that no good thing was to be seen. "No man can eat his cake and have it." I  would add that what remains till to-morrow will stink.

As for evil being unripe good, I say nothing with respect to objective evil, except that it is a part of the universe   which it may be the business of immortal man to search out for ever, and still see more beyond. We cannot  understand it because it is relative, and relative to more than we know. But subjective evil is absolute; we are  conscious of it as independent of external circumstances; its physical power is bounded by our finitude, bodily and  mental, but within these its intensity is without measure. A bullet may be diverted from its course by the medium
through which it passes, or it may take a wrong one owing to the unskilfulness of the shooter, or the intended   victim may change his place; but all this depends, not on the will of the shooter, but on the ignorance of his mind,  the weakness of his body, the resistance of inert matter, or the subsequent act of another agent; the bullet of the   murderer may be turned aside to drive a nail, or what not, but his will is independent of all this, and may be judged    at once without appeal.

                                    Yet still the lady shook her head,
                                      And swore by yea and nay,
                                   My whole was all that he had said,
                                       And all that he could say.

                                                                             J. C. MAXWELL.