ALL 'S RIGHT WITH THE WORLD 



goes by chance in this universe. Not a snowflake 

 falls but its form and its course are determined by 

 forces as old as the universe; pitch a stone from 

 your hand and the elder gods know exactly where 

 it shall alight. Is not this good predestinarianism ? 

 Yes, but not as Jonathan Edwards saw it ; it is as 

 science sees it. It is good everlastingism — the ways 

 of a Power without variableness or shadow of turn- 

 ing, which Edwards anthropomorphized into a cruel, 

 despotic, almighty man. We are predestined to 

 heaven or hell by the dispositions we inherit from 

 our fathers, by the environment which society makes 

 for us, by the age and country in which we live, 

 and by the strength and weakness of our own char- 

 acters, which again are the result of forces as old as 

 the race, and as constant and impersonal in their 

 activity as gravitation. 



The rising vapor proves gravitation as fully as 

 the falling rain. The wildest, freest thing on wings 

 goes only its appointed way. With the course of 

 the swallow hawking for insects in the air, or with 

 the course of the insects themselves soaring in the 

 sunshine, the hand of chance plays no part any 

 more than it does with the sailboat obeying wind 

 and current on yonder bay, which again is a good 

 symbol of a man's course throughout this world, 

 impelled by impulses inherited from his fathers, 

 and awakened by the circumstances of his life. 



We speak of the chance meeting of this man and 

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