That falleth not oft in a thousand year,
For, certainly, our appetites here,
Be it of war, or peace, or hate, or love,
All this is ruled by the sight above.

CHAUCER: _The Knighte's Tale_.

The Greek Tragedy expressed the same sense: "Whatever is fated, that will
take place. The great immense mind of Jove is not to be transgressed."

Savages cling to a local god of one tribe or town. The broad ethics of
Jesus were quickly narrowed to village theologies, which preach an
election or favoritism. And, now and then, an amiable parson, like Jung
Stilling, or Robert Huntington, believes in a pistareen-Providence, which,
whenever the good man wants a dinner, makes that somebody shall knock at
his door, and leave a half-dollar. But Nature is no sentimentalist--does
not cosset or pamper us. We must see that the world is rough and surly,
and will not mind drowning a man or a woman; but swallows your ship like
a grain of dust. The cold, inconsiderate of persons, tingles your blood,
benumbs your feet, freezes a man like an apple. The diseases, the
elements, fortune, gravity, lightning, respect no persons. The way of
Providence is a little rude. The habit of snake and spider, the snap of
the tiger and other leapers and bloody jumpers, the crackle of the bones
of his prey in the coil of the anaconda--these are in the system, and our
habits are like theirs. You have just dined, and, however scrupulously the
slaughter-house is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is
complicity--expensive races--race living at the expense of race. The
planet is liable to shocks from comets, perturbations from planets,
rendings from earthquake and volcano, alterations of climate, precessions
of equinoxes. Rivers dry up by opening of the forest. The sea changes its
bed. Towns and counties fall into it. At Lisbon, an earthquake killed men
like flies. At Naples, three years ago, ten thousand persons were crushed
in a few minutes. The scurvy at sea; the sword of the climate in the west
of Africa, at Cayenne, at Panama, at New Orleans, cut off men like a
massacre. Our Western prairie shakes with fever and ague. The cholera, the
small-pox, have proved as mortal to some tribes, as a frost to the
crickets, which, having filled the summer with noise, are silenced by a
fall of the temperature of one night. Without uncovering what does not
concern us; or counting how many species of parasites hang on a bombyx; or
gro