THE UNIVERSAL BENEFICENCE 



starve him, freeze him, crush him, as quickly as she 

 will any other form of life. Is the account balanced 

 by the fact that she has given him the wit and the 

 power to avoid these calamities in a larger measure 

 than she has given them to any other creature? That 

 is the way the great mystery works. Every creature 

 is exposed to the hazards of its kind, but within its 

 reach are always the benefits and advantages of its 

 kind, and these latter have steadily kept in the lead. 

 The evolutionary impulse toward the horse, toward 

 the dog, toward the bird, has apparently been as 

 jealously guarded and promoted as the impulse to- 

 ward man. Man in his own conceit is at the head of 

 the animal kingdom, and the whole creation is for 

 him, though there are other animals that surpass 

 him in strength, speed, and endurance. But he 

 alone masters and makes servants of the inorganic 

 forces, and thus rules the world below him. 



I set out to say that the beneficent force or 

 Providence that brought us here has had to struggle 

 with the non-beneficent in inert matter, and, at 

 times, with what looks like the deliberately malig- 

 nant in living matter; micro-organisms everywhere 

 lying in wait for tangible bodies and reducing them 

 back to the original dust out of which they came — 

 the work of one god being held up or wrecked by 

 another god. In the vegetable kingdom are blights 

 and scabs and many forms of fungous diseases; in 

 the animal are hostile bacteria and parasites work- 



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