Is the world an experiment?
is it a perishable form to which destruction must come?
If it is, is not God inconsistent and impotent?
inconsistent, because He ought to have seen the result before the attempt,--moreover why should He delay to destroy that which He is to destroy ?--impotent, for how else could He have created an imperfect man?
"If an imperfect creation contradicts the faculties which man attributes to God we are forced back upon the question, Is creation perfect?
The idea is in harmony with that of a God supremely intelligent who could make no mistakes; but then, what means the degradation of His work, and its regeneration?
Moreover, a perfect world is, necessarily, indestructible; its forms would not perish, it could neither advance nor recede, it would revolve in the everlasting circumference from which it would never issue.

In that case God would be dependent on His work; it would be co-eternal with Him; and so we fall back into one of the propositions most antagonistic to God.

If the world is imperfect, it can progress; if perfect, it is stationary.

On the other hand, if it be impossible to admit of a progressive God ignorant through a past eternity of the results of His creative work, can there be a stationary God?
would not that imply the triumph of Matter?
would it not be the greatest of all negations?
Under the first hypothesis God perishes through weakness; under the second through the Force of his inertia.
"Therefore, to all sincere minds the supposition that Matter, in the conception and execution of the worlds, is contemporaneous with God, is to deny God.

Forced to choose, in order to govern the nations, between the two alternatives of the problem, whole generations have preferred this solution of it.