THE NATURAL PROVIDENCE 



whole life is a part of the flux and uncertainty of 

 things. No god watches over him aside from himself 

 and his kind, no atom or molecule is partial to him, 

 gravity crushes him, fire burns him, the floods 

 drown him as readily as they do vipers and vermin. 

 He takes his chances, he gains, and he loses, but 

 Nature treats him with the same impartiality that 

 she treats the rest of her creatures. He runs the same 

 gantlet of the hostile physical forces, he pays the 

 same price for his development; but his greater 

 capacity for development — to whom or what does 

 he owe that? If we follow Darwin we shall say natu- 

 ral selection, and natural selection is just as good a 

 god as any other. No matter what we call it, if it 

 brought man to the head of creation and put all 

 things (nearly all) under his feet, it is god enough 

 for anybody. At the heart of it there is still a mys- 

 tery we cannot grasp. The ways of Nature about us 

 are no less divine because they are near and famil- 

 iar. The illusion of the rare and the remote, science 

 dispels. Of course we are still trying to describe the 

 Infinite in terms of the finite. 



IV 



We are so attached to our kind, and so dependent 

 upon them, that most persons feel homeless and 

 orphaned in a universe where no suggestion of sym- 

 pathy and interest akin to our own comes to us 

 from the great void. A providence of impersonal 



103 



