just as much on the side of the rat as on the side of the cat; she arms each to defeat the other, and the fittest survives. She has not given the rabbit strength or ferocity, but she has given her speed and a sleepless eye and great fecundity, and her enemies do not cut her off. The struggle and competition of life go on everywhere. But life is not all a struggle; it is unity and coöperation as well. The trees of the forest protect one another; one form of life profits by another form. In the whole drama of organic nature we find waste and prodigality. Our economics are set at naught by the power that works to no special ends, but to all ends, and finds its account in the tumor that eats up the man, as much as in the man himself, in the fungi that destroy the potato crop, or the chestnut-trees, as truly as in these things themselves. Yet behold what specialization and what development has taken place in spite of these cross-purposes, this chaos of conflicting interests! Out of discord has come harmony; out of conflict has come peace; out of death has come life; out of the reptile has come the bird; out of the beast has come man; out of the savage has come the moral conscience; out of the tribe has come the nation; out of tyranny has come democracy. It is the waste, the delays, the pain, the price to be paid, that appall us. We must regard creation as a whole, as the evolution of worlds and systems, and not concentrate our attention upon man and his ways, or upon the earth--so small a part of our solar system. Our benevolent institutions are not types of the universe; our idea of fatherhood does not fit the Eternal. Our fathers had a complete and consistent explanation of the problem of evil that so perplexes us. They invented or postulated two opposing and contending principles in the world--one divine, the other diabolical. One they named God, the other, Satan. Their conception of God would not allow them to saddle all the evil and misery of the world upon him; they had to look for a scapegoat, and they found him in the Devil. One is just as necessary to a consistent cosmogony as the other. If we must have an all-wise, all-merciful, all-powerful, all-loving God--the author of all good and the contemner of all evil--we must also have a god of the opposite type, the great mischief-maker and enemy of human happiness--the author of war, pestilence, famine, disease, and of all that hinders and defeats the reign of the perfect good. Without the conception of the Devil, we are forced to the conclusion, either that God is not omnipotent, or that he is responsible for all the sin and suffering in the world. If you make man this Devil, then who made man? Wrestle with the problem as we may, we are impaled on one or the other horn of the dilemma. Our traditional God is more cruel and more indifferent to human suffering than any tyrant that ever gloated over human blood and agony, or else he is fearfully limited in his power for good.