THE ANIMATED CREATION. 277 



and adopted for producing a similar improvement of infant 

 life throughout the world at large. 



In this part of our subject, the most difficult point certainly 

 lies in those occurrences of disease where the afflicted individual 

 has been in no degree concerned in bringing the visitation upon 

 himself. Daily experience shows us infectious disease arising 

 in a place where the natural laws in respect of cleanliness are 

 neglected, and then spreading into regions where there is no 

 blame of this kind. We then see the innocent suffering equally 

 with those who may be called the guilty. Nay, the benevolent 

 physician who comes to succour the miserable beings whose 

 error may have caused the mischief, is sometimes seen to fall 

 a victim to it, while many of his patients recover. We are 

 also only too familiar with the transmission of diseases from 

 erring parents to innocent children, who accordingly suffer, and 

 perhaps die prematurely, as it were for the sins of others. 

 After all, however painful such cases may be in contemplation, 

 they cannot be regarded in any other light than as exceptions 

 from arrangements, the general working of which is bene- 

 ficial. 



With regard to the innocence of the suffering parties, there 

 is one important consideration which is pressed upon us from 

 many quarters namely, that moral conditions have not the 

 least concern in the working of the physical laws. These 

 arrangements proceed with an entire independence of all such 

 conditions, and desirably so, for otherwise there could be no 

 certain dependence placed upon them. Thus it may happen 

 that of two persons ascending a piece of scaffolding, the one a 

 virtuous, the other a vicious man, the former, being the less 

 cautious of the two, ventures upon an insecure place, falls, and 

 is killed, while the other, choosing a better footing, remains 

 uninjured. It is not in what we can conceive of the nature of 

 things, that there should be a special exemption from the ordi- 

 nary laws of matter, to save this virtuous man. So it might 

 be that of two physicians, attending fever cases in a mean part 

 of a large city, the one, an excellent citizen, may stand in such 

 a position with respect to the beds of the patients as to catch 

 the infection, of which he dies in a few days, while the other, 

 a bad husband and father, and who, unlike the former, only 

 attends such cases with selfish ends, takes care to be as much 

 as possible out of the stream of infection, and accordingly 

 escapes. In both of these cases man's sense of good and evil 

 his faculty of conscientiousness would incline him to 



