SOUNDINGS 



mire and rejoice, but let us fear and plead and 

 tremble no more. There is nothing to be afraid of 

 worse than ourselves, and nothing to implore and 

 propitiate farther removed from us than the rain 

 and the sunshine. In the end all things work to- 

 gether for our good — not always for the good of 

 to-day, or of to-morrow, or for this man or that 

 man, but for the good of all, for the good which 

 evolution brings in its train. Evolution brings what 

 we call evil also, but evil is a term of our human ex- 

 perience, and the Infinite, the Eternal, knows it not. 

 What is evil to one creature in the struggle for life 

 we have seen to be good to another, and often 

 what our religious fears recoil from, science sees 

 as the beneficent operation of law. In Nature noth- 

 ing is unclean; her chemistry meets and appropri- 

 ates all, even when we flee or faint. Our physical 

 well-being forces upon us the conception of the 

 clean and the unclean, but in the processes of the 

 Nature that sustains us both are one. 



We are adjustable creatures. We are r/either 

 sugar nor salt, neither round nor square, neither 

 iron nor lead; we yield and we resist, we melt and 

 we freeze. We are as adjustable and as adaptive as 

 the leaves of the forest. The firmly woven texture of 

 the leaf, its mobile stem, the flexible branch to which 

 it clings, make it secure against the ordinary vicissi- 

 tudes to which it is subject. 



Man is the most adaptive of all creatures; he is 



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