266 PURPOSE AND GENERAL CONDITION 



tive tribes have been expressly organized, and their organiza- 

 tion of course is of divine appointment. Constituted as we 

 are, we cannot suppose a plan involving so much suffering to 

 have been adopted except with a view to that independency, 

 or completeness within itself, which is here argued for as the 

 manner in which the Deity's operations on earth are revealed 

 to us. He has endowed the families which enjoy his bounties 

 with an almost indefinite fecundity, that enjoyment may be as 

 widely diffused as possible ; but the limitation of the results of 

 this fecundity within the line necessary according to circum- 

 stances, were no right immediate employment for himself. 

 The object is accomplished, in a befitting manner, by his 

 ordaining that certain other animals shall have endowments 

 sure so to act as to bring the rest of animated beings to a 

 proper balance. And the object is accomplished well ; inso- 

 much that we never hear of any but the most partial and 

 transient discrepancy between the volume of inferior animal 

 life and the power appointed for its regulation. Even in this 

 painful chapter of nature, we are forced to acknowledge 

 that, upon the theory of law, everything is very good. 



Another proof, or rather another branch of the same proof, 

 lies in the relation of the individual to the mass, as far as en- 

 dowment and destiny are concerned. We see, for example, 

 powerful impulses in human nature, which often occasion 

 great inconveniences both to those yielding to them and to 

 others. But such impulses are in the main necessary. De- 

 structive, in many cases, to the individual, they are conserva- 

 tive with respect to the totality. What is this but an appoint- 

 ment to render the machine in that respect (so to speak) a 

 self-acting one ? Many of the confusions of the moral scene 

 might be thus explained ; but it is also to be observed that 

 such impulses are not sent alone they come in company with 

 intelligence and moral emotion, powers continually tending 

 more and more to soften and regulate their actions. 



Nor are any of the ordinary evils of our world altogether 

 unmixed. God, contemplating apparently the unbending 

 action of his great laws, has established others which appear 

 to be designed to have a compensating, a repairing, and a 



