ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE 



in troubled waters and have lost our reckoning. We 

 cannot excuse such being on the ground that his 

 ways are inscrutable and past finding out. A 

 creator who sends into the world the malformed, the 

 half-witted, the bestial, the naturally depraved, and 

 then holds them to high ethical standards, is con- 

 demned by the ideals which he has implanted with- 

 in us. 



N ow the naturalist has no such trouble . He sees 

 that good and evil are only re lative ter ms; that 

 they both grow on the same tree; that we should 

 not know good were there no evil; that there would 

 be no development were there not what we call evil. 

 Pain and suffering are inseparable from the human 

 lot. ""'I hey are a part of the price we pay tor our 

 place in the world. All struggle we look upon as 

 evil. Disease, failure, death are looked upon as evil, 

 but they are conditions of our lives. Through sick- 

 ness we learn the laws of health. The lower ani- 

 mals have no such troubles — no sickness, intem- 

 perance, or war or avarice. They know without 

 reason how to live, but man has reason, and the joy 

 of its exercise and the peril of its failure. Are we 

 not all willing to pay the price? — to take it on 

 these terms rather than to change places with the 

 brutes? 



What a troublesome time the good orthodox 

 brethren have with their God! He does, or per- 

 mits such terrible things. Only yesterday He sent a 



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