have judged wrongly. We know also that their error would have been owing to their inability to foresee events of what was, to them, an incalculably remote future, and of a nature which no experience of theirs could have by any possibility enabled them to imagine. Suppose a brood of young birds to die before they are fledged, is there necessarily any waste occasioned thereby? By no means. Their bodies serve to nourish various other creatures, and these a multitude of others, till ultimately swarms of bacteria reduce the various organic substances to their proximate or ultimate elements, thus serving to nourish vegetation-the food of animals-and ultimately ministering to the service of human beings. The man who spills a gallon of wine in order to fill a wine-glass is not wise, unless the wine he so spills answers some other purpose he has in view, and which he desires as much as the filling of the glass. In the latter case he is not unwise in spilling But the idea of God implies a Being who is at once the one ultimate Cause of all the processes of nature. Since He wills and intends them all, it is impossible but that whatever results must fulfil His intention. Nature is so arranged that the purpose of its First Cause can never be defeated, happen what may. The failure of one end is but the fulfilling of other and different ends. When the matter of the artist's or philosopher's brain becomes the prey of lowly organisms, it fulfils one Divine purpose, and another when its living activities aid in producing creations of beauty and wisdom. It is as impossible for any accident to defeat the purpose of Him whose will ordained every process, as it is for any man, by acting in opposition to what his conscience tells him is God's will, to do otherwise than stultify himself by hastening on the fulfilment of God's purposes in some other way. There is truly no such thing as real failure, no such thing as absolute waste, in the whole universe of being. life. The second objection affirms that the pains and evils The evils of of life, endured even by animals, show that the world cannot be the creation of a being absolute in goodness and infinite in power. But this objection, the difficulties of which must in no way be blinked, is, in truth, no less easily dis posed of, though it has at first a very formidable look. We are asked what we can say in explanation of the petty cares, the tedious weariness, the cruel sufferings from gnawing pain, or, worse, from inconsolable grief and from terrible moral evil? The world not only suffers, but has suffered for millions of years ere man was. For untold ages bloodthirsty rapine has raged and reigned, and cries of pain, due to cruel wounds and to limbs crushed in blood-stained jaws, have continually resounded in the only one of God's worlds we are able to know and understand. The very existence of many creatures is bound up with the sufferings of others, and parasites, external and internal, torture their helpless and involuntary hosts by means of implements carefully contrived for securing their hold and aiding their progress. The reply to this objection needs to be divided under two heads. Under the first we will consider the evils of life as far as regards man, and subsequently we will consider them as affecting all other sentient organisms. First, with respect to the world and man, we may ask our dissatisfied opponents what they would have. Would they have (1) a system of things in which there were no painful or destructive agencies, or (2) a system in which pain and suffering should be dealt out to each man with full justice, exactly according to his deserts? To those who might choose the former alternative it may be replied, in the first place, that the whole course of nature would have to be altered to effect it. The storms and other violent commotions of air and ocean have their beneficent as well as their destructive effects, and the circulation of these elements is closely connected with the maintenance of vegetation and animal life, and therefore with the life of man. No one pretends that God can do what is absurd or contradictory, and the range of objective. contradiction may be much more extensive than is commonly supposed. God cannot make a circular triangle or cause an event now passed, never to have happened; for such things are contradictions, and therefore nonentities which can have no relation to Omnipotence. But how many objective contradictions which are beyond our know * ledge may render really irrational, and therefore impossible to God, actions which to us may seem likely to open out short cuts and easy roads to perfection? We have already seen that God cannot make all things which are separately possible to be actual simultaneously-not all things which are possible can possibly co-exist. There may thus be inherent absurdity and contradiction in the notion that all that makes life best worth living could have existed in a material universe devoid of any kind of hurtful or destructive activity-in a world in which water should not drown, or any action of the sun's rays or any climatic conditions tend to injure health or destroy life. What would be the social, intellectual, and moral condition of a population, no member of which, whatever he did, could possibly hurt himself? What progress in the arts of life would be made were hunger and thirst either never felt or always to be assuaged without any inconvenient effort; were shelter from bad weather never needed, and were no sanitary conditions required for long and healthy life? But the loss we should suffer from the absence of all life's trials would be inexpressibly worse than a mere deprivation of some material goods; our moral loss would be incalculable. Is it not the very difficulties and dangers of the world which call forth noble efforts and raise the moral standard of whole populations? As has been well said by Dr. Henry Hayman, "If there was no natural theatre of peril, there could be no natural school of hardihood and courage. To whatever extent, then, these virtues are prized, we must exempt from censure any machinery needed to produce them." Indeed, if all pain and evil disappeared from human life, all that is most lovely would disappear with it. Then there would be no opportunities or occasions for generous self-denial, loving pity, tender compassion, or ardent philanthropic effort. Thus a morality which would begin by abolishing all the physical evils of life would find in the end that it had stultified itself by having thereby abolished that by which its own being was nourished and sustained. Could we, then, afford to lose pain and suffering altogether? *See above, p. 385. Let us now consider the other alternative offered by us to the objectors to God's goodness-a system in which full justice, exactly according to his deserts, should be dealt out to each man in this life. In such a world all pain, suffering, loss, or disaster, would always and everywhere be infallibly withheld from each man according to the degree of his uprightness and virtue. A condition of things more likely to be fatal to all uprightness and virtue it is, we believe, impossible to conceive. As Dr. Hayman has again said, "Human actions being moralized by their motives, the ascendant motive, especially amidst a race so far tainted with selfishness as mankind, would tend to become a selfish craving for personal exemption from loss, damage, disaster, and violent death; this working everywhere, in generation after generation of men, must inevitably result in stamping out all virtuous principle among them. . . . Every one would know his own motives and his neighbour's, and each would appraise the others as all working for wages punctually paid in a premium of insurance against all danger or disadvantage." If in every stage of universal society, from the cradle to the grave, nature had stood over us like a hundredhanded Briareus, with a bribe in every hand, ostensibly to promote virtue, virtue would thereby have been poisoned. How, under such circumstances, could any act of generosity or self-sacrifice have been possible? No; it is far better that the crew of a lifeboat should now and then be drowned, than the noble sentiments which make the manning of such a boat so common should be made absolutely impossible to mankind. Fatal to all true nobility of character would such a condition of things indeed befar more deadly than even the preceding alternative. In a world in which pain and suffering were unknown, there would be no stimulus to virtue, but in one constructed on a system of universal rewards, virtue would be strangled in its birth. But what need is there that we should wish to abolish all the trials of life, seeing that we have good evidence for the immortality of the soul? Once grant the ex*See below, p. 487. * istence of an all-powerful, all-wise, and all-just God, and justice demands a future life. Therewith it becomes readily conceivable that present sufferings may be hereafter seen by us to have been truly blessings in disguise. We will now proceed to the second portion of our reply that which relates to the sufferings of animals. It is indeed quite true that for ages, perhaps for hundreds of millions of years, millions of millions of individual animals have been in a state of unceasing battle, and that teeth, claws, hooks, and suckers have been devoted to the spilling of blood. Yet that very slaughter has had its effects in diminishing the sufferings due to want, disease, and senile decay. The exclamation, "Sharp be the brand and swift the blow, and short the pain to undergo," was no expression of malignity. Moreover, the essence of our suffering is mental, and much of the pain we feel at contemplating animal sufferings is really uncalled for, and due to our tendency to attribute our own feelings and experiences to creatures more or less like us. It is not the sensation pure and simple that so distresses us, but such sensation accompanied by intellectual consciousness and reflection. Only during consciousness does it exist at all, and only in the most highly organized men and women does it attain its acme. Savages seem to have often far less sensitiveness to pain than have cultivated and refined people. The direness of our pain depends on our knowledge of it-the agony of recollecting past moments of suffering and anticipating future ones. Such agony can only exist in a being possessed of a nature like ours, capable of "looking before and after." Moreover our nature, being an intellectual one, enters into and mingles with all the feelings we are conscious of, and therefore we cannot argue with any exactness from our feelings to those of brutes, because we cannot imagine what feelings felt but not consciously perceived can really be. And though, of course, animals feel, they do not know that they feel, nor can they reflect upon any of the pains they have endured in the past or will have to endure in the future. Associations of sensations they of course have, and sights or sounds associated with previous sufferings |