Page:Calvinism, an address delivered at St. Andrew's, March 17, 1871.djvu/17

 and without an illogical but none the less a positive certainty that things are not as they seem—that, in spite of appearance, there is justice at the heart of them, and that, in the working out of the vast drama, justice will assert somehow and somewhere its sovereign right and power, the better sort of persons would find existence altogether unendurable. This is what the Greeks meant by the 'Ανάγvκη or destiny, which at the bottom is no other than moral Providence. Prometheus chained on the rock is the counterpart of Job on his dunghill. Torn with unrelaxing agony, the vulture with beak and talons rending at his heart, the Titan still defies the tyrant at whose command he suffers, and, strong in conscious innocence, appeals to the eternal Μοῖρα which will do him right in the end. The Olympian gods were cruel, jealous, capricious, malignant; but beyond and above the Olympian gods lay the silent, brooding, everlasting fate of which victim and tyrant were alike the instruments, and which at last, far off, after ages of misery it might be, but still before all was over, would vindicate the sovereignty of justice. Full as it may be of contradictions and perplexities, this obscure belief lies at the very core of our spiritual nature, and it is called fate or it is called predestination according as it is regarded pantheistically as a necessary condition of the universe or as the decree of a self-conscious being.

Intimately connected with this belief, and perhaps the fact of which it is the inadequate expression, is the existence in nature of omnipresent organic laws, penetrating the material world, penetrating the moral