book; it was a success, in its way, and he looked on it with a cheerful
sense that he had a right to be proud of it. The Master opened the
volume, and, putting on his large round glasses, began reading, as
authors love to read that love their books.

--The only good reason for believing in the stability of the moral order
of things is to be found in the tolerable steadiness of human averages.
Out of a hundred human beings fifty-one will be found in the long run
on the side of the right, so far as they know it, and against the wrong.
They will be organizers rather than disorganizers, helpers and not
hinderers in the upward movement of the race. This is the main fact
we have to depend on. The right hand of the great organism is a little
stronger than the left, that is all.

Now and then we come across a left-handed man. So now and then we find
a tribe or a generation, the subject of what we may call moral
left-handedness, but that need not trouble us about our formula. All we
have to do is to spread the average over a wider territory or a longer
period of time. Any race or period that insists on being left-handed
must go under if it comes in contact with a right-handed one. If there
were, as a general rule, fifty-one rogues in the hundred instead
of forty-nine, all other qualities of mind and body being equally
distributed between the two sections, the order of things would sooner
or later end in universal disorder. It is the question between the leak
and the pumps.

It does not seem very likely that the Creator of all things is taken by
surprise at witnessing anything any of his creatures do or think. Men
have sought out many inventions, but they can have contrived nothing
which did not exist as an idea in the omniscient consciousness to which
past, present, and future are alike Now.

We read what travellers tell us about the King of Dahomey, or the
Fejee Island people, or the short and simple annals of the celebrities
recorded in the Newgate Calendar, and do not know just what to make
of these brothers and sisters of the race; but I do not suppose an
intelligence even as high as the angelic beings, to stop short there,
would see anything very peculiar or wonderful about them, except as
everything is wonderful and unlike everything else.

It is very curious to see how science, that is, looking at and arranging
the facts of a case with our own eyes and our own intelligence, without
minding what somebody else has said