NATURAL HISTORY OF CREATION. 267 



ronditions, they can only Iiave effects generally beneficial. 

 Often there must be an interference of one law with 

 another ; often a law will chance to operate in excess, 

 or upon a wrong object, and thus evil will be produced. 

 Thus, winds are generally useful in many ways, and the 

 sea is useful as a means of communication between one 

 country and another; but the natural laws wliich 

 produce winds are of indefinite range of action, and 

 sometimes* are unusually concentrated in space or in 

 time, so as to produce storms and hurricanes, by which 

 much damage is done ; the sea may be by these causes 

 violently agitated, so that many barks and many lives 

 perish. Here, it is evident, the evil is only exceptive. 

 Suppose, again, that a boy, in the course of the lively 

 sports proper to his age, suffers a fall which injures his 

 spine, and renders him a cripple for life. Two things 

 have been concerned in the case : first, the love of 

 violent exercise, and second, the law of gravitation. 

 Both of these things are good in the main. In the rash 

 enterprises and rough sports in which boys engage, they 

 are only making the first delightful trials of a bodily and 

 mental energy which has been bestowed upon them as 

 necessary for their figuring properly in a scene where 

 many energies are called for, but where the exertion 

 of these powers is ever a source of happiness. By 

 gravitation, all movable things, our own bodies included, 

 are kept stable on the surface of the earth. But when 

 it chances that the playful boy loses his hold (we shall 

 say) of the branch of a tree, and has no solid support 

 immediately below, the law of gravitation unrelentingly 

 pulls him to the ground and thus he is hurt. Now it 

 was not a piimary object of gravitation to injure boys \ 

 but gravitation could not but operate in the circum- 



