s are the work of blind, unconscious Nature, it is idle to
spend our breath in discussion or recrimination. Even regret is foolish.
We have to take the world as we find it, with all its disadvantages,

and make the best of a not too brilliant bargain. Instead of screaming
we must study; instead of wailing we must reflect; and eventually, as we
gain a deeper knowledge of the secrets of Nature, and a greater mastery
over her forces, we shall be better able to foresee the approach of evil
and to take precautionary measures against it.

But the standard teaching of England, to say nothing of less civilised
nations, is not Naturalism but Theism. We are told that there is a God
over all, and that he doeth all things well. On the practical side this
deity is called Providence. It is Providence that sends fine weather,
and Providence that sends bad weather; Providence that sends floods,
and Providence that sends drought; Providence that favors us with a fine
harvest, and Providence that blights the crops, reducing millions of
people, as in Russia at this moment, to the most desperate shifts of
self-preservation. It is Providence that saves Smith's precious life in
a railway accident, and of course it is. Providence that smashes poor
Jones, Brown and Robinson.

Now it will be observed that the favorable or adverse policy of
Providence is quite irrespective of human conduct, There is no moral
discrimination. If Grace Darling and Jack the Ripper were travelling by
the same train, and it met with an accident, everybody knows that their
chances of death are precisely equal. If there were any difference it
would be in favor of Jack, who seems very careful of his own safety, and
would probably take a seat in the least dangerous part of the train.

Some people, of course, and especially parsons, will contend that
Providence does discriminate. They have already been heard to hint that
the Russian famine is on account of the persecution of the Jews. But
this act of brutality is the crime of the Government, and the famine
falls upon multitudes of peasants who never saw a Jew in their lives.
They have to suffer the pangs of hunger, but the Czar will not go
without a single meal or a single bottle of champagne.

No doubt a pious idiot or two will go to the length of asserting or
insinuating that the earthquake in Japan is a divine warning to the
people, from the Mikado down to his meanest subject, that they are too
slow in accepting Chr