THE ANIMATED CREATION. 271 



It appears at first difficult to reconcile with this idea the 

 many miseries which we see all sentient beings, ourselves in- 

 cluded, occasionally enduring. How, the sage has asked in 

 every age, should a Being so transcendently kind, have allowed 

 of so large an admixture of evil in the condition of his crea- 

 tures 1 Do we not at length find an answer to a certain extent 

 satisfactory, in the view which has now been given of the con- 

 stitution of nature ? We there see the Deity operating in the 

 most august of his works by fixed laws, an arrangement which, 

 it is clear, only admits of the main and primary results being 

 good, but disregards exceptions. Now the mechanical laws 

 are so definite in their purposes, that no exceptions ever take 

 place in that department ; if there is a certain quantity of 

 fluid matter to be agglomerated and divided and set in motion 

 as a planetary system, it will be so with hair's-breadth accu- 

 racy, and cannot be otherwise. But the laws presiding over 

 meteorology, life, and mind, are necessarily less definite, as 

 they have to produce a great variety of mutually-related results. 

 Left to act independently of each other, each according to its 

 separate commission, and each with a wide range of potentiality 

 to be modified by associated conditions, they can only have 

 effects generally beneficial. Often there must be an inter- 

 ference of one law with another ; often a law will chance to 

 operate in excess, or upon a wrong object, and thus evil will 

 be produced. Thus, winds are generally useful in many ways, 

 and the sea is useful as a means of communication between 

 one country and another ; but the natural laws which produce 

 winds are of indefinite range of action, and sometimes are 

 unusually concentrated in space or in time, so as to produce 

 storms and hurricanes, by which much damage is done ; the 

 sea may be by these causes violently agitated, so that many 

 barks and many lives perish. Here, it is evident, the evil is 

 only exceptive. Suppose, again, that a boy, in the course of 

 the lively sports proper to his age, suffers a fall which injures 

 his spine, and renders him a cripple for life. Two things have 

 been concerned in the case : first, the love of violent exercise, 

 and second, the law of gravitation. Both of these things are 

 good in the main. Boys, in the rash enterprises and rough 

 sports in which they engage, are only making the first de- 

 lightful trials of a bodily and mental energy which has been 

 bestowed upon them as necessary for their figuring properly 

 in a scene where many energies are called for, and where the 

 exertion of these powers is ever a source of happiness. By 



