OX THE CREATION AND GOD. 53 



lives, have apparently turned upon a cast of the dice ; 

 when we brood over all these things, then, indeed, the 

 desperate suggestion sometimes rises within us, that 

 there is and has been no power at the helm, that the 

 universe drifts purposeless, or that some base and malig- 

 nant power is a co-ordinate principle with the good, if 

 not the chief controller of the course of things. In this 

 mood, the stars seern to run blindly ; the world is " an 

 unweeded garden that runs to seed," where " things rank 

 and gross in nature " alone have full and riotous posses- 

 sion ; men are 



The flies of later spring, 

 That lay their eggs and sting and sing, 

 And weave their petty cells and die. 



But these are the dark moments of the trial of our faith, 

 to which we ever return when the paroxysm of doubt 

 and denial has passed. For if the social world, with its 

 evils and miseries, thus sometimes shakes our belief, 

 Nature, ever bountiful and beautiful, is all around us to 

 restore it. And reason and reflection come to our aid 

 also ; for we find that truth after all is triumphing, 

 and that the reign of .justice is slowly extending. We 

 find within ourselves that truth in its pursuit and pos- 

 session is verily what Aristotle, what Plato, and what 

 Bacon, following them, proclaimed it to be " the sove- 

 reign good of human nature." And virtue, goodness, 

 spite of appearances to the contrary, i'f the right tests 

 are applied, is found to be progressing. Possibly not the 

 heroic virtues, but at least sympathy, benevolence, pity, 

 and a wider regard for justice. These social virtues are 

 spreading over wider areas, and are diminishing the fell 

 intensity of the conflict for existence, now no longer 

 carried on without quarter to the vanquished. They are 

 binding men together, and narrowing the range of the 



