334 AROUND AN OLD HOMESTEAD. 



the pain. For not all pain brings with it joy, nor is all 

 joy derived from pain. The thrusts of tragedy are 

 not necessary to happiness. 



The world, that is, is diseased, and its natural in- 

 tentions perverted and distorted. "The time is out of 

 joint," as Hamlet said. It is a fact which does not 

 need much repetition to gain acceptance. The apostle 

 was not so far wrong when he insisted upon our de- 

 pravity. Humanity has had its golden age in the past, 

 and looks forward to another golden age in the future. 

 We have not been made glad that sin has entered into 

 the world. We might have lived without the sin — 

 else why the vision of the golden age? And will sin 

 otherwise always be? Explain its existence as we may 

 — perhaps as the result, as the philosophers say, of our 

 mutability, that Is, of the possibilities and contingencies 

 incident to imperfection — the sharp accusation yet rests 

 upon the universe of the presence of evil In Its midst, 

 with all its concurrent manifestations of moral and 

 physical disorder and pain. 



The problem of suffering Is not a pleasant one, and 

 the acknowledgment of pain among the lower animals 

 does not make us happy. The "weight of all this un- 

 intelligible world" is assuredly a weary burden. Yet 

 most of the brutes that are killed by man die an easier 

 death and are really more humanely killed than when 

 they die naturally, of wounds, or starvation, or old 

 age. It is evidently not the purpose of Nature to 

 avoid pain. When Whitman, in one of his rare con- 

 ceptions, addressed the sea as "the passionless wet" he 

 spoke a true philosophy. There Is no mercy In Nature. 

 The ocean swallows up those unfortunately wrecked 



