That there should be suffering at all in the universe is, no doubt, a mysterious thing; but the fact is evident, and certain benefits which flow from it are also evident. Indeed, we fail to see how a world of sentient beings could continue to exist, unless the penalty of suffering were attached to natural law. Further, all such penalties are, in consequence of the permanence of matter and the conservation of force, necessarily permanent, unless in cases where some reaction sets in under the influence of some other law or force than that which brings the penalty. Even in this case, the effect of any violation of any natural law is eternal and infinite. No sane man doubts this in the case of what may be called sins against natural laws; but many, with strange inconsistency, doubt and disbelieve it in the higher domain of morals. If we were for a moment to admit the materialist's doctrine that appetites, passions, and sentiments are merely effects of physical changes in nerve-cells, then we should be shut up to the conclusion that the effects of any derangement of these must be perpetual and coextensive with the universe. Why should it be otherwise in things belonging to the domains of reason and conscience? Further, if natural laws are the expression of the will of the Creator, and if these unfailingly assert themselves, and must do so, in order to the permanence of the material universe, would not analogy teach that, unless the Supreme Being is wholly bound up in material processes, and is altogether indifferent to moral considerations, the same regularity and constancy must prevail in the spiritual world?
This question is closely connected with the ideas of sacrifice and atonement. Nothing is more certain in physics than that action and reaction are equal, and that no effect can be produced without an adequate cause. It results from this that every action must involve a corresponding expenditure of matter and force. Anything else would be pure magic; which, we know, is nonsense. Thus every intervention on behalf of others must imply a corresponding sacrifice. We cannot raise a fallen child or aid the poor or the hungry without a sacrifice of power or means proportioned to the result. So, in the moral world, degradation cannot be remedied nor punishment averted without corresponding sacrifice; and this, it may be, on the part of those who are in no degree blameworthy. If men have fallen into moral evil and God proposes to elevate them from this condition, this must be done by some corresponding expenditure of force, else we have one of those miracles which would imply a subversion of law of the most portentous kind. The moral stimulus given by the sacrifice itself is a secondary consideration to this great law of equivalency of cause and effect. There is, therefore, a perfect conformity to natural analogy in the Christian idea of the substitution of the pure and perfect Man for the sinner, as well as in that of the putting forth of the divine power manifested in him to raise and restore the fallen.