"This struck him as true, and he died without making restitution.
"And so behold us launched into a discussion on life and death, on the world and its alleged Creator.
"Some one remarked that whether there be a God or no, it is impossible to introduce that device either into nature or into a discussion without darkening it.
"Another said that if a single supposition explained all the phenomena, it would not follow from this that it is true; for who knows whether the general order only allows of one reason? What, then, must we think of a supposition which, so far from resolving the one difficulty for the sake of which people imagined it, only makes an infinity of others spring up from it?
"I believe, my dear, that our chat by the fireside still amuses you; so I go on.
"Among these difficulties is one that has been proposed ever since the world has been a world; 'tis that men suffer without having deserved suffering. There has been no answer to it yet. 'Tis the incompatibility of physical and moral evil with the nature of the Eternal Being. This is how the dilemma is put: it is either impotence or bad will; impotence, if he wished to hinder evil and could not; bad will, if he could have hindered it and did not will it. A child would understand that. It is this that has led people to imagine the fault of the first father of us all, original sin, future rewards and punishments, the incarnation, immortality, the two principles of the Manicheans, the Ormuzd and Ahriman of the Persians, the doctrine of emanations, the empire of light and darkness, metempsychosis, optimism, and other absurdities that have found credit among the different nations of the earth, where there is always to be found some hollow vision of a dream, by way of answer to a clear, precise, and definite fact.
"On such occasions what is the part of good sense? Why, the part that we took: whatever the optimists may say, we will reply to them that if the universe could not exist without sensible creatures, nor sensible creatures without pain, there was nothing to do but to leave chaos at peace. They had got on very well for a whole eternity without any such piece of folly.
"The world a piece of folly! Ah, my dear, a glorious folly for all that! 'Tis, according to some of the inhabitants of Malabar, one of the seventy-four comedies with which the Eternal amuses himself.