ALL 'S RIGHT WITH THE WORLD 



is something to know that things look better under 

 the surface, that there is no profound conspiracy 

 of evil against us, that the universe really has the 

 well-being of each of us at heart, and that if we fall 

 short of that well-being, we are not ihe victims of a 

 malignant spirit, but the sufferers from the opera- 

 tion of a beneficent law. 



The universe has our well-being at heart in a 

 general, universal sense, and not in a personal sense. 

 For instance, our lives depend upon the bounty of 

 the rain, and yet the rain does not accommodate 

 itself to the special personal needs of this man or 

 that man, and it may result in a flood that brings 

 death and ruin in its path. Like a,ll other things in 

 nature, it is a general beneficence to which we have 

 to accommodate ourselves. It rains alike upon the 

 just and the unjust, upon the sea and upon the 

 land, upon the sown field and upon the mown hay 

 — a broadcast, wholesale kind of providence. 



I confess that from the course of life and the pro- 

 cesses of nature one cannot infer the existence of 

 a Being such as our fathers worshiped — a kind of 

 omnipresent man, whose relation to the universe 

 was that of maker and governor. 



We get instead the conception of an infinite 

 power, not separable from the universe, but one 

 with it, as the soul is one with the body, which 

 finally expresses itself in man as reason, as love, as 

 awe, as beauty, as aspiration, as righteousness; in 

 273 



