masters of morals who pretend to found on Fatalism the 
morality of the future ; see them when they are victims of in- 
justice, wounded in their self-interest or their pride, what do 
they do ? Why ! they are indignant, they are angry. Oh ! 
strange simplicity — angry? with an irresponsible Being ? Accuse 
a senseless machine because it crushes a human existence 
beneath its wheels ? Denounce the instincts of the beast which 
devours because it is carnivorous ? The Fatalists, when with 
extreme inconsistency they rise in protest against injustice 
of which they are victims, give the lie emphatically to their 
own system ; they show involuntary respect to human nature, 
for to protest against crime is to honour man. 
I am not conjuring up vain phantoms, these ideas are rapidly 
becoming popular, although we may not happen to have come 
across them ; our sons may some day give expression to them 
in the language of the schools, and the very handicraftsman 
who works for you may be reading them greedily, presented to 
him, as they are, in the most agreeable form. But, even if we 
do not accept the system, we may be accepting its results. How 
sweet to rid ourselves of the burden of responsibility ! How 
sweet when enslaved by a passion we do not care to fly, to lay 
the blame on a peculiar state of circumstances or on nature ! It 
is so convenient thus to escape the importunity of conscience to 
say that we do not do it, but it is the result of irresistible 
influences. In this way Fatalism will always be tacitly popular. 
The dogma was born on the day when the first sinner laid the 
blame of his act on God, and it always will remain the 
philosophy of sin, for it alone can give it the semblance of law. 
Faith in Providence may be said to have entered the world 
with the advent of Christianity; up to that time men did not 
believe in it. Paganism admitted certain tutelary deities of 
the country, or the family, but above them, nay, above Jupiter 
himself, they placed the cold, motionless, impassible figure of 
destiny or fate; although the belief in a supreme God may be 
pretty clearly traced in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. 
Philosophers cannot be said to have admitted that the world 
was guided by a beneficent Will to an end mysterious, but 
definite. Never were the now widely-spread ideas of progress, 
Divine training, providential plan, even once enunciated during 
the ages of human existence. The most careful search into the 
literature of antiquity will not bring to light a page or a line 
which, however remotely, indicates such a belief. 
No Pagan ever heard the beatings of the universal Father’s 
heart in his own, or in the world's history never did it occur to 
his mind to seek from this Father strength under trial ; and 
when overwhelmed by misfortune his sole consolation lay in 
