ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE 



That this is the best possible world, humanly 

 speaking, I have no doubt, yet sin and misery are 

 on every hand. Sin and misery are terms of our 

 own which simply express some of the conditions of 

 our development. They are like the terms "up" 

 and "down," "east" and "west," and "near" and 

 "far"; they are relative. Nature knows no good and 

 no bad; all is good; that is, all favors development. 

 The rivers reach the sea, no matter what the obsta- 

 cles in the way. The seasons come and go, no matter 

 how delayed. 



Nature's ends, so far as we can name them, are 

 wholesale — to keep the game going, to heap the 

 measure, to play one hand against the other. She is 

 more solicitous about the race than about the indi- 

 vidual. The wreck of worlds or suns in sidereal space 

 matters little; there are infinite worlds and suns left. 

 What would really matter would be failure of celes- 

 tial mechanics. The eclipse of the sun and the moon 

 occurring exactly on time, "without the untruth of 

 a single second," tells how perfectly the great ma- 

 chine runs. The eclipse itself is an accident, but a 

 harmless one; it is not a necessity in the movements 

 of our system. 



If man is the end of things, as we would fain be- 

 lieve, then why was he so long a-coming? Why will 

 he as surely disappear from the earth? Why has he 

 not come to other planets in our system? When he 

 disappears from our solar system, will not the great 



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