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 quantities are incommensurable; the virtues or vices of a man are not among the causes which launch, or do not launch, a chimney pot at his head.

Outside these "changes and chances" of human life, the thoughtful mind feels conscious of a profound dissatisfaction with many of the inevitable conditions of human existence: the sensative faculties are at their keenest when the intelligence is not sufficiently developed to utilise them; the perceptive faculties begin to fail as the reflective touch their fullest development; and when experience is ripest, judgment most trained, knowledge most full, old age lays its palsy on the brain, and senility shakes down the edifice just when a life's toil has made it of priceless value. To recognise our limitations, to accept the inevitable, to amend—so far as amendment is possible—both ourselves and our environment, all this forms part of a rational philosophy of life; but what has such self-controlled and keen-eyed sternness of resolve to do with hysterical outcries for help to some power outside nature, which, if it existed as creator, must have modelled our existence at its pleasure, and towards which our attitude could be only one of bitterest, if silent, rebellion? To bow to the inevitable evil, while studying its conditions in order to strive to make it the evitable, is consistent with strong hope which lightens life's darkness; but to yield crushed before evil deliberately and consciously inflicted by an omnipotent intelligence—in such fate lies the agony of madness and despair.

Nor do we find any reliable signs of the presence of a God in glancing over the incidents of human history. We note unjust wars, in which right is crushed by might, in which victory sides with "the strongest battalions", in the issue of which there appears no trace of a "God that judgeth the earth". We meet with cruelties that sicken us inflicted on man by man; butcheries that desolate a city, persecutions that lay waste a province. In every civilised land of to-day we see wealth mocking poverty, and poverty cursing wealth; here, thousands wasted on a harlot, and there children sobbing themselves in hunger to sleep. Our earth rolls wailing yearly round the sun, bearing evidence that it has no creator who loves and guides it, but has only its men, children of its own womb, who by the ceaseless toil of countless