340 THE FUTURE OF RELIGION AND MORALS. 



intended. Give what latitude to the word " intention " 

 that your imagination enables you, but it is by some 

 such analogy that we must interpret Nature's opera- 

 tions ; and her evident continuing kindness to us in the 

 daily rising of the sun, in her corn and wine, her fruits 

 and flowers, is a confirmation of our faith in her sym- 

 pathy with and good will to men. 



And even if the universe, with its present law and 

 order, could conceivably have come from chance, we are 

 sure it does not thither tend ; for we men have now the 

 course of it, at least on our earth, in large measure in 

 our hands. We are now co-labourers with Nature, and 

 it is by our conscious efforts striving to further her aims 

 that the further work of development is to be carried on. 

 It is in and by us men that the higher level, spiritual, 

 artistic, moral, social, to which she is aspiring, is to be 

 reached. 



Can it be said to all this, that if Nature had not 

 reached her present most excellent things, the chefs- 

 d'oeuvre of her workmanship, she would have reached 

 others as great or greater, though of a different sort; 

 that it mattered not which of the cross-roads of chance 

 she took at any critical moment in the evolution of 

 things ; that if she had not accidentally struck on life, 

 and afterwards on consciousness, which carried with it 

 all its glorious after-contents, she would have found 

 something else as good or better ? May it be said of 

 Nature (as of man himself) that if she had not taken 

 one path at a critical moment in her career, she might 

 have prospered just as well by trying another, or on 

 the other hand, that what she has attained to, and now 

 holds by, might possibly have been far surpassed ; that, 

 far from having taken the tide at the flood that leads on 

 to fortune, she missed it rather on the earth, from whence 



