us to take fresh interest in our poor fellow denizens of the world, and
not to despise them because Almighty benevolence could not be expected
to admit them to heaven; to the same teaching we owe the recognition of
the noble aspirations embodied in every form of religion, and the
destruction of the ancient monopoly of Divine influences; and it is
science again that has taught us to accommodate ourselves to the laws in
which we are placed, instead of fruitlessly struggling against them and
invoking miraculous interference to conquer them. The theology of which
I am now speaking differs, indeed, radically from the old, so radically
that one is at times surprised that the agreement, to use a common word,
should reconcile vital differences in faith. But it often tends to the
same end by a different path. It attempts to deny the existence of
evils, instead of proclaiming their ultimate destruction. Every thing
comes from a paternal hand; why struggle against it? Disease and
starvation and nakedness are, somehow or other, parts of a divine system
which is somehow or other deserving of our sincerest adoration. If
anybody who is in fact naked or sick or starving takes that phrase in
the sense that he had better submit cheerfully to evils which he cannot
help, there is little to be said against it. If the doctrine of the
Divine origin of all things is compatible with the belief that a vast
number of things are utterly hateful, that we ought to spend our whole
energy in eradicating them, and to protest against them with our latest
breath, then the doctrine is certainly innocuous. But whether there is
much use in language thus employed seems a little questionable; and, in
any case, it is clear that it really adds nothing, except words, to the
teaching of science.

Here again people cling passionately to the old formulae because they
appear to sanction a soothing optimism. We cannot be happy, it is said,
unless we believe that our wishes will be fulfilled; and we endeavor to
convert our wishes into a guaranty for their own fulfilment. If we
cannot make up our minds to say "never," neither can we resolve to admit
that there is really evil. We passionately assert that the past will
come back and that pain will turn out to be an illusion. The argument
against the infidel comes essentially to this; you tell me that my hopes
will not be realized, and therefore you make me necessarily and
needlessly miserable. For God's sake, do not dis