NATURAL HISTORY OF CREATION, 269 



length shrinks into a comparatively narrow compass, 

 though there certainly is no reason to suppose that it 

 will he at any early period, if ever, altogether dispensed 

 with, while man's constitution remains as it is. In con- 

 sidering 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 

 misuse his powers much in this way at first, compared 

 with what he is likely to do when he advances into a 

 condition of civilisation. In the scheme of providence, 

 thousands of years of frequent warfare, all the so-called 

 glories which fill history, may be but a subordinate con- 

 sideration. The chronology of God is not as our chro- 

 nology. 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 inconceivable 

 period, have no inhabiting organisms superior to reptiles. 

 Nothing is it to him that wdiole astral systems should be 

 for infinitely longer spaces of time in the nebular em- 

 bryo, unfit for the reception of one breathing or sentient 

 being out of the myriad multitudes who are yet to mani- 

 fest his goodness and his greatness. 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 evolution of superior being which has been pre- 

 arranged and set forward in independent action, free 

 within a certain limit, but in the main constrained, 



