Page:The kernel and the husk (Abbott, 1886).djvu/104

88 "No." These are but small phenomena in Nature's chamber of horrors: but for me they have always been, and will always remain, horrible. I believe that God intends us to regard them with horror and perhaps to see in them some faint reflection of the wantonly destructive and torturing instinct in man.

Those are fine-sounding lines, those of Cleanthes:—

I should like to agree with them; but I cannot. The picture of the cat and the mouse appears—fertile in suggestions. "This at least," I say, "was not wrought by 'evil men in their folly;' and yet it did not come direct from God." Isaiah pleases me better with his prediction, physiologically absurd, but spiritually most true: "The lion shall eat straw like a bullock." That is just the confession that I need: it comes to me with all the force of a divine acknowledgment, as if God thereby said: "Death and conflict must be for a time, but they shall not be for ever: it was not my intention, it is not my will, that my creatures should thrive by destroying each other."

Applying this theory to Evolution, I believe that Satan, not God, was the author of the wasteful and continuous conflict that has characterized it; but that God has utilized this conflict for the purposes of development and progress. This is what I had in my mind when I said that Evolution diminished the difficulties in the way of acknowledging the existence of a God. The problems of death, destruction, waste, conflict and sin, are not new; they are as old as Job, perhaps as old as the first-created man; but it is new to learn that good has resulted from