258 PURPOSE AND GENERAL CONDITION 



obstruction to our misuse of them. That were an arrangement 

 of a kind which he has nowhere made. But he has established 

 many laws in our nature which tend to lessen the frequency and 

 destructiveness of these abuses. Our reason comes to see that 

 war is purely an evil, even to the conqueror. Benevolence inter- 

 poses to make its ravages less mischievous to human comfort, 

 and less destructive to human life. Men begin to find that their 

 more active powers can be exercised with equal gratification 

 on legitimate objects ; for example, in overcoming the natural 

 difficulties of their path through life, or in a generous spirit 

 of emulation in a line of duty beneficial to themselves and 

 their fellow-creatures. Thus, war at length shrinks into a 

 comparatively narrow compass, though there certainly is no 

 reason to suppose that it will be at any early period, if ever, 

 altogether dispensed with, while man's constitution remains 

 as it is. In considering an evil of this kind, we must not 

 limit our view to our own or any past time. Placed upon 

 the earth with faculties prepared to act, but inexperienced, 

 and with the more active propensities necessarily in great 

 force to suit the condition of the globe, man was apt to mis- 

 use his powers much in this way at first, compared with 

 what he is likely to do when he advances into a condition of 

 civilization. In the scheme of Providence, thousands of years 

 of frequent warfare, all the so-called glories which fill history, 

 may be but a subordinate consideration. The chronology of 

 God is not as our chronology. See the patience of waiting 

 evinced in the slow development of the animated kingdoms, 

 throughout the long series of geological ages. Nothing is it 

 to him that an entire goodly planet should, for an inconceiv- 

 able period, have no inhabiting organisms superior to reptiles. 

 Progressive, not instant effect, is his sublime rule. What, 

 then, can it be to him that the human race goes through a 

 career of impulsive acting for a few thousand years ? The 

 cruelties of ungoverned anger, the tyrannies of the rude and 

 proud over the humble and good, the martyr's pains, and the 

 patriot's despair, what are all these but incidents of an evolu- 

 tion of superior being which has been pre-arranged and set 

 forward in independent action, free within a certain limit, 



