OF THE ANIMATED CREATION. 



187 



«ach other, each according to its separate commission, 

 and each with a wide range of potentiality to be modified 

 by associated conditions, they can only have effects gen- 

 erally beneficial : often there must be an interference of 

 one law with another, often a law will chance to operate 

 in excess, or upon a wrong object, and thus evil will be 

 produced. Thus, winds are generally useful in many 

 ways, and the sea is useful as a means of communication 

 between one country and another ; but the natural laws 

 which produce winds are of indefinite range of action, 

 and sometimes are unusually concentrated in space or in 

 time, so as to produce storms and hurricanes, by which 

 much damage is done ; the sea may be by these causes 

 violently agitated, so that many barks and many lives 

 perish. Here, it is evident, the evil is only exceptive 

 Suppose, again, that a boy, in the course of the lively 

 sports proper to his age, suffers a fall which injures his 

 spine, and renders him a cripple for life. Two things 

 have been concerned in the case : first, the love of violent 

 exercise, and second, the law of gravitation. Both of these 

 things are good in the main. In the rash enterprises and 

 rough sports in which boys engage, they prepare their 

 bodies and minds for the hard tasks of life. By gravita- 

 tion, all moveable things, our own bodies included, are 

 kept stable on the surface of the earth. But when it 

 chances that the playful boy loses his hold, (we shall say) 

 of the branch of a tree, and has no solid support imme- 

 diately below, the law of gravitation unrelentingly pulls 

 him to the ground, and thus he is hurt. Now it was 

 not a primary object of gravitation to injure boys; but 

 gravitation could not but operate in the circumstances, 

 its nature being to be universal and invariable. The evil 

 is, therefore, only a casual exception from something in 

 the main good. 



The same explanation applies to even the most con- 

 spicuous of the evils which afflict society. War, it may 

 be said, and said truly, is a tremendous example of evil, 

 in the misery, hardship, waste of human life, and mis- 

 spending of human energies, which it occasions. But 

 what is it that produces war ? Certain tendencies ot 

 human nature, as keen assertion of a supposed right, re- 

 sentment of a supposed injury, acquisitiveness, desire of 

 admiration, combativeness, or mere love of excitement. 

 All of these are tendencies which are every day, in a U J - 



