The Nature God neither sends calamities nor wills them--they are an inevitable part of the growth and development of things; they are eddies in the stream of forces. What we call evil is evil only from our point of view; evil is a human word and not the word of the Infinite. If the world were something made by a Maker external to it, then it were pertinent to ask, Why not make it a better world? Why not leave out pain and sin and all other phases of evil? But the world is not something made, and it did not have a Maker, as we use those words. The universe _is_, and always has been, “from everlasting to everlasting,” and man is a part of it, and his life is subject to the same vicissitudes as the rest of creation. Man has come into this sense of right and wrong, of justice and mercy, of truth and falsehood, of good and evil, as necessary conditions of his development, but those things are not absolute; they pertain to him alone. The physical forces break out of their natural bounds and run riot for a season; the human forces do the same thing and give rise to various excesses. The crimes and misdemeanors of man are exceptional as the outbreaks in nature are exceptional. They relate man to nature and show how the same plan runs through both. A world with storm and the warring and violence of the elements left out would be a radically different world--an impossible world. And a world of man, a Quaker world, is equally impossible. If some being of infinite wisdom and love had made the world and made man to live in it, we could ask him some embarrassing questions; but, let me repeat, the world was not made, it is only a link in a chain of cosmic events, and it is not for man any more than for any other creature. Each must “work out his own salvation, with fear and trembling.” Introduce design into nature and you humanize it and get into difficulties at once. It is above design. We have no language in which to speak the ultimate truth, no language in which to describe the character and the doings of the Infinite. The ways of the Infinite are not only past finding out, they are unspeakable by reason of our finite relations to them. We cannot arraign the Nature God. It does not design, nor make, nor govern, nor employ means to ends, as do the man-made gods. It _is_. All things are a part of its infinite complexity. Nature rests forever in itself. It neither fails nor succeeds. In itself it is neither good nor evil, neither divine nor devilish; it is all things to all men, because they are all things to it. It is neither one nor many; it is the Infinite. In these vain attempts to define or describe the indefinable I have no language but that of the finite, no language but that of our limited or circumscribed relation to the world of concrete and fragmentary things. Hence I am constantly like the plains ranger caught by his own lasso, or the angler caught by his own hook.