THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING. 



339 



and 't is appropriate in the case of animals as with men, 

 when misery and inequality come to them. 



It is not a pleasant picture that John Fiske gives, 

 in his "Through Nature to God," when, in his discus- 

 sion of the mystery of evil, he speaks of the reality 

 of the perpetual, unintermittent tragedy and rapine that 

 underlie the apparent peacefulness of the fields : 



"Any summer field, though mantled in softest green, is the 

 scene of butchery as wholesale as that of Neerwinden and far 

 more ruthless. The life of its countless tiny denizens is one of 

 unceasing toil, of crowding and jostling, where the weaker fall 

 unpitied by the way, of starvation from hunger and cold, of 

 robbery utterly shameless and murder utterly cruel. That 

 green sward in taking possession of its territory has extermi- 

 nated scores of flowering plants of the sort that human eco- 

 nomics and aesthetics stigmatize as weeds ; nor do the blades 

 of the victorious army dwell side by side in amity, but in their 

 eagerness to dally with the sunbeams thrust aside and supplant 

 one another without the smallest compunction. Of the crawl- 

 ing insects and those that hum through the air, with the quaint 

 snail, the burrowing worm, the bloated toad, scarce one in a 

 hundred but succumbs to the buffets of adverse fortune before 

 it has achieved maturity and left offspring to replace it. The 

 early bird, who went forth in quest of the worm, was lucky 

 if at the close of a day as full of strife and peril as ever knight- 

 errant encountered, he did not himself serve as meal for some 

 giant foe in the gloaming. When we think of the hawk's 

 talons buried in the breast of the wren, whUe the relentless 

 beak tears the little wings from the quivering body, our mood 

 toward Nature is changed, and "we feel like recoiling from a 

 world in which such black injustice, such savage disregard 

 for others, is part of the general scheme." 



