THE GOSPEL OF NATURE 
natural law and order, the good of that system of 
things out of which we came and which is the source 
of our health and strength. It is good that fire 
should burn, even if it consumes your house; it is 
good that force should crush, even if it crushes you; 
it is good that rain should fall, even if it destroys 
your crops or floods your land. Plagues and pesti- 
lences attest the constancy of natural law. They set 
us to cleaning our streets and houses and to readjust- 
ing our relations to outward nature. Only in a live 
universe could disease and death prevail. Death is 
a phase of life, a redistributing of the type. Decay 
is another kind of growth. 
Yes, good in everything, because law in every- 
thing, truth in everything, the sequence of cause and 
effect in everything, and it may all be good to me if 
on the right principles I relate my life to it. I can 
make the heat and the cold serve me, the winds and 
the floods, gravity and all the chemical and dynami- 
cal forces, serve me, if I take hold of them by the 
tight handle. The bad in things arises from our 
abuse or misuse of them or from our wrong relations 
to them. A thing is good or bad according as it 
stands related to my constitution. We say the order 
of nature is rational; but is it not because our reason 
is the outcome of that order? Our well-being consists 
in learning it and in adjusting our lives to it. When 
we cross it or seek to contravene it, we are destroyed. 
But Nature in her universal procedures is not ra- 
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