iting a few years and then plunging
them bodily into a tank. It would be comic if it were not so tragic.

This train of thought is the after-swell from an argument with
Cullingworth this evening. He holds that the human race is deteriorating
mentally and morally. He calls out at the grossness which confounds the
Creator with a young Jewish Philosopher. I tried to show him that this
is no proof of degeneration, since the Jewish Philosopher at least
represented a moral idea, and was therefore on an infinitely higher
plane than the sensual divinities of the ancients. His own views of the
Creator seem to me to be a more evident degeneration. He declares
that looking round at Nature he can see nothing but ruthlessness and
brutality. "Either the Creator is not all-powerful, or else He is not
all-good," says he. "Either He can stop these atrocities and won't, in
which case He is not all-good; or else He would stop them but can't, in
which case He is not all-powerful." It was a difficult dilemma for a man
who professes to stick to reason to get out of. Of course, if you plead
faith, you can always slip out of anything. I was forced to get behind
a corner of that buckler with which you have so often turned my own
thrusts. I said that the dilemma arose from our taking it for granted
that that which seemed evil really was EVIL. "It lies with you to prove
that it isn't," said he. "We may hope that it isn't," said I. "Wait
until some one tells you that you have cancer of the pyloric end of the
stomach," said he; and he shouted it out again every time I tried to
renew the argument.

But in all soberness, I really do think, Bertie, that very much which
seems to be saddest in life might be very different if we could focus it
properly. I tried to give you my views about this in the case of drink
and immorality. But physically, I fancy that it applies more obviously
than it does morally. All the physical evils of life seem to culminate
in death; and yet death, as I have seen it, has not been a painful or
terrible process. In many cases, a man dies without having incurred
nearly as much pain, during the whole of his fatal illness, as would
have arisen from a whitlow or an abscess of the jaw. And it is often
those deaths which seem most terrible to the onlooker, which are least
so to the sufferer. When a man is overtaken by an express and shivered
into fragments, or when he drops from a fourth-floor window and
is smashed into a bag of spl