s not touch the complaint that the structure is
not such as fits in with the existence of a presiding intelligence such
as theism asks us to accept. And the question of Canon Green's whether
we could turn out a better universe than the one that actually exists,
is wide of the mark also. If I purchase a motor car as the work of a
genius in car-building, and find when I get my purchase home that it
cannot be made to run, it does not destroy the justice of my complaint
to ask whether I could build a better one or not. The important thing is
that the car is not what it should be, and judging by the product the
builder is not what he is represented to be either. Dr. Martineau was
far too keen a controversialist to adopt Canon Green's foolish retort,
but he does seek to parry the force of the atheist criticism by saying
that God "if once he commits his will to any determinate method, and for
the realisation of his ends selects and institutes a scheme of
instrumental rules, he thereby shuts the door on a thousand things that
might have been done before." (_Study_, p. 85). To that one may reply,
so much the worse for his judgment; while if the fact of his having once
adopted a "determinate method" caused him to resolve to stick to it, in
spite of its consequences in practice, and irrespective of the
beneficial results that might have followed its modification, we can
only regret that the deity was not acquainted with Emerson's opinion
that "a foolish consistency is the bugbear of little minds." Even what
is said to be the greatest mind of all might easily have benefited from
the warning.

Canon Green tries another line of reply, which is not in the least more
convincing. He pictures to us a father who, by misappropriating trust
funds, brings disgrace to the whole of his family. The mother is driven
to despair and drink. The sister dies for want of food, the brother
finds his career ruined. The disaster is complete, and Canon Green says
it is inevitable because we cannot have a world in which the relations
of parents and children exist without having them suffer from each
other's faults. So far as the present world goes that is true. But it is
certainly a strange reply to the complaint that an arrangement is unjust
to say that as the injustice results from the arrangement, therefore, we
have no cause for complaint. And that _we_ are unable to make a better
world is beside the mark. Between the perception of an injustice, and
the