LEAF AND TENDRIL 



must be paid for law and order on a permanent 

 basis ? We deplore the waste and the suffering, but 

 these things never can be eliminated from the pro- 

 cesses of evolution. As individuals we can mitigate 

 them ; as races and nations we have to endure them. 

 Waste, pain, delay — the gods smile at these things; 

 so that the game goes on, that is enough. How 

 many thousand centuries of darkness and horror 

 lie between the man of to-day and the low animal 

 ancestor from which he sprang! Who can picture 

 the sufferings and the defeats ! But here we are, and 

 all that terrible past is forgotten, is, as it were, the 

 soil under our feet. 



Our fathers were cheered and sustained by a 

 faith in special providences — that there was a Su- 

 preme Power that specially interested itself in man 

 and his doings, and that had throughout the course 

 of history turned the adverse currents in his favor. 

 It is certain that all things have worked together 

 for the final good of the race as a whole, otherwise 

 it would have disappeared from the face of the earth. 

 But Providence does things by wholesale. It is like 

 the rain that falls upon the sea and the land equally, 

 upon the just and the unjust, where it is needed and 

 where it is not needed ; and the evolution of the life 

 of the globe, including the life of man, has gone on 

 and still goes on, because, in the conflict of forces, 

 the influences that favored life and forwarded it 

 have in the end triumphed. 

 244 



