onnection with what is in God that the
word Good has any real meaning. Appearance is neither good nor bad; it
is simply not real."

"But," cried Audubon, interrupting in a kind of passion, "It is in
appearance that we live and move and have our being. What is the use
of saying that appearance is neither good nor bad, when we are feeling
it as the one or the other every moment of our lives? And as to the
Good that is in God, who knows or cares about it? What consolation is
it to me when I am suffering from the toothache, to be told that God
is enjoying the pain that tortures me? It is simply absurd to call
God's Good good at all, unless it has some kind of relation to our
Good."

"Well," said Dennis, "as to that, I can only say that, in my opinion,
it is nothing but our weakness that leads us to take such a view. When
I am really at my best, when my intellect and imagination are working
freely, and the humours and passions of the flesh are laid to rest, I
seem to see, with a kind of direct intuition, that the world, just as
it is, is good, and that it is only the confusion and obscurity due to
imperfect vision that makes us call it defective and wish to alter it
for the better. When I perceive Truth at all, I perceive that it is
also Good; and I cannot then distinguish between what is, and what
ought to be."

"Really," cried Audubon, "really? Well, that I cannot understand."

"I hardly know how to make it clear," he replied, "unless it were by
a concrete example. I find that when I think out any particular aspect
of things, so far, that is to say, as I can think it out at all, all
the parts and details fall into such perfect order and arrangement
that it becomes impossible for me any longer to desire that anything
should be other than it is. And that, even in the regions where at
other times I am most prone to discover error and defect. You know,
for instance, that I am something of an economist?"

"What are you not?" I said. "If you sin, it is not from lack of
light!"

"Well," he continued, "there is, I suppose, no department of affairs
which one is more inclined to criticise than this. And yet the more
one investigates the more one discovers, even here, the harmony
and necessity that pervade the whole universe. The ebb and flow of
business from this trade or country to that, the rise and fall of
wages, or of the rate of interest, the pouring of capital into or
out of one industry or another, the varying relatio