Both appear great at a distance, but when we approach them we find they are far less insurmountable than we had conceived. Evil is inevitable, but is also remediable. Evil has no substance of its own, but is only the defect, excess, perversion, or corruption of that which has substance. The true rule in determining to embrace or reject anything is not whether it have any evil in it, but whether it have more of evil than of good. There are few things wholly evil or wholly good.
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root. It is some compensation for great evils that they enforce great lessons. It is almost impossible systematically to constitute a natural moral law. Nature has no principles. She furnishes us with no reason to believe that human life is to be respected.