Some seek for a solution of the mystery, and try to reconcile the existence of evil with that of an almighty and beneficent Creator, by assuming that in the long run everything will come right. Evolution, they say, has led constantly to higher and better things, and when carried far enough will lead to a state of society in which wars will cease, evil passions die out, and universal love and charity prevail—in other words, to a millennium. Even if this were true, what of the untold millions of the human race who have perished in their sins while evolution was slowly working out this tardy millennium? Are they the _chair à canons_, whom a Napoleon-like Deity sacrifices with cynical indifference, in the calculated moves of the game of Creation? Is this their idea of an all-wise and all-merciful Father who is in heaven? And again, is it true that evolution works constantly for good and promises to bring about such a millennium? It is doubtless true that evolution means progress, and the ever-increasing development of the more and more complex and differentiated from the simple and uniform. But is this all for good, or all for happiness; and is not evolution, like everything else, subject to the primary and all-pervading law of polarity? We have only to ask the question to answer it. In the case of the individual, which is the epitome of the history of the species, is development from the engaging innocence of childhood always in the direction of goodness and happiness? So far is this from being the case that, as individuals and societies advance, and become higher and more complex in the scale of organisation, the law of polarity asserts itself with ever-increasing force, and contrasts become sharper. The good become better, the bad worse; and as we become less Like the beasts with lower pleasures, Like the beasts with lower pains, if our happiness becomes more intense, so does our misery become more intolerable. I refer not merely to physical conditions, though here the contrast is most apparent. An intelligent traveller who recently circled the world, surveying mankind with a keen and impartial eye ‘from China to Peru,’ says, as the result of his experience, ‘The traveller will not see in all his wanderings so much abject repulsive misery among human beings in the most heathen lands, as that which startles him in his civilised Christian home, for nowhere are the extremes of wealth and poverty so painfully presented.’ This is perfectly true; but it would be a rash conclusion to infer that civilised and Christian countries are worse than heathen lands, or that those who march in the van of progress and succeed in the struggle for life, have a larger dose of original sin than the laggards and those who fail.