of surfeiting alongside of paupers dying of hunger; we find giants
by the side of dwarfs; the healthy and well-formed near the crippled
or those wasted away by terrible diseases; Apollos contrast with
Quasimodos; men of genius are met with, cheek by jowl with idiots;
some children are stillborn, others blind or deaf and dumb from birth.
Extremely different races people the earth--on the one hand,
unintelligent and cannibal negroes; on the other, the proud, handsome,
and intelligent, though selfish and cruel white race. Again, from a
moral standpoint, who can explain congenital tendencies to crime, the
vicious by birth, the wicked by nature, the persons with
uncontrollable passions? Wherefore are thrift and foresight lacking in
so many men, who are consequently condemned to lifelong poverty and
wretchedness? Why this excess of intelligence, used mainly for the
exploiting of folly? It is useless to multiply examples, one has only
to look around at hospitals and prisons, night-shelters, palaces and
garrets; everywhere suffering has taken up its abode. Can no reply be
given to this terrible charge brought against Divinity? Is man to
remain in a state of dejection and discouragement, as though some
irreparable catastrophe had befallen him?

According to the Church, all this is the work of the soul which God
gives at the birth of a man--a soul that is good or bad, prudent or
foolish, one which damns or saves itself according as its will can, or
cannot, dominate its passions, its intelligence discover the way to
heaven or not; according as grace or rejection predestine it to heaven
or to hell.

Is it not the depth of profanity to represent God as watching over
conceptions in order to create souls so unfairly endowed, most of whom
will never hear the Gospel message, and consequently cannot be saved,
whilst the rest are destined to animate the bodies of savages and
cannibals, devoid of moral consciousness? Is it not an act of
sacrilege thus to convert God, Who is all Wisdom and Love, into a kind
of accomplice of adulterers and lewd persons or the sport of
Malthusian insults. Unconscious blasphemers are they who would offer
this Dead Sea fruit as the true manna of Life!

There is also another theory, often advanced in certain quarters, on
which we must say a few words, for though it contains only a minimum
of truth, and consequently cannot withstand serious examination, it
has led astray more than one earnest thinker. Inequali