To suffer pain is an imperfection?
. It is.
. Are we not sometimes affected with pain and
uneasiness by some other Being?
. We are.
. And have you not said that Being is a Spirit, and is
not that Spirit God?
. I grant it.
. But you have asserted that whatever ideas we perceive
from without are in the mind which affects us. The ideas,
therefore, of pain and uneasiness are in God; or, in other words,
God suffers pain: that is to say, there is an imperfection in the
Divine nature: which, you acknowledged, was absurd. So you are
caught in a plain contradiction.
. That God knows or understands all things, and that
He knows, among other things, what pain is, even every sort of
painful sensation, and what it is for His creatures to suffer
pain, I make no question. But, that God, though He knows and
sometimes causes painful sensations in us, can Himself suffer
pain, I positively deny. We, who are limited and dependent
spirits, are liable to impressions of sense, the effects of an
{241} external Agent, which, being produced against our wills,
are sometimes painful and uneasy.
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