ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE 



as local as the turtle, and as cosmopolitan as the 

 eagle. All climes, all conditions of wet and dry, of 

 plain and mountain, of sea and shore, of island 

 and continent, are his. His home is the world. 

 Lately he has conquered the air with forces of the 

 earth. Will he yet conquer the ether with forces 

 of the air? Already the ether conveys his messages, 

 but no mechanical contrivance of his can yet lay 

 hands upon it. 



Let me again say that by the Natural Providence 

 I mean the general beneficence of Nature, the 

 blind, undiscriminating, uncalculating, inevitable 

 beneficence which brought us here and keeps us 

 here, and makes it good for us to be alive, despite 

 the vicissitudes and the occasional apparently lesser 

 phases of malevolence to which we are subject. 

 The changing seasons, the fertile soils, the rains, 

 the dews, the snows, the blue skies, the green earth, 

 the flowing streams, the gentle winds, in fact all 

 the conditions that make life possible and per- 

 manent, are expressions of this beneficence. The 

 whole movement of evolution, with all its dark and 

 forbidding phases, is an expression of it. Allow time 

 enough and the turbid stream flows itself clear, and 

 the stream of evolution is fast losing, has lost, most 

 of its terrible and repellent features. At its flood, in 

 earlier geologic times, one may say that its waters 

 were charged with the elements of huge, uncouth, 

 and terrible forms which have been mostly elimi- 



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