The Natural Providence is not concerned about you and me. In comparison it is concerned only about our race, and not lastingly concerned about that, since races, too, shall go. “Races rise and fall, Nations come and go; Time doth gently cover all With violets and with snow.” As I sit here under an old heavy-topped apple-tree on a hot midsummer day, a yellow leaf lets go its hold upon the branch over my head and comes softly down upon the open book I am reading. It is a perfect leaf, but it has had its day. The huge family of leaves of which it was a member are still rank and green and active in sustaining the life of the tree, but this one has dropped out of the leafy ranks. There are a few small dark spots upon it, which, I see with my pocket glass, are fungus growths, or else some germ disease of apple-tree leaves, perhaps, like pneumonia, or diphtheria, or tuberculosis among men. One leaf out of ten thousand has fallen. Was Fate cruel to it? From the point of view of the leaf, yes--could a leaf have a point of view; from the point of view of Nature, no. The tree has leaves enough left to manufacture the needed chlorophyl, and that satisfies the law. If all the leaves were blighted, or were swept off by insect enemies, or stripped by hail and storm, that were a calamity to the tree. But one leaf, though all the myriad forces of Nature went to its production, though it is a marvel of delicate structure and function, though the sun’s rays have beaten upon it and used it, and been kind to it, though evolution worked for untold ages to bring its kind to perfection--what matters it? It will go back into the soil and the air from which it came, and contribute its mite to another crop of leaves, and maybe it has rendered the molecules of carbon and hydrogen and oxygen of which it is composed more ready and willing to enter into other living combinations. And the fungus germs that have preyed upon it, they, too, have had their period of activity, and have justified themselves. Nature thus pits one form against another, and her great drama of life and death goes on. Are her stakes more in the one than in the other, since she favors both? Yes, she has more at stake in health than in disease. If disease always triumphed, all life would go out. Of course, in the sum total of things, the life of this old tree counts for but little, but if it failed to bear apples, its chief end would be defeated. Evil is limited; it is a minor counter-current, but it is just as real as the good; it is a phase of the good; we have evil because we first have good. Both are relative terms. We are prone to speak of good and evil as if they were something absolute, like gravity or chemical affinity. But are they any more absolute than heat and cold, or than big and little? What pleases us, and is conducive to our well-being, we call good, and its opposite we call evil. We are not to make our wants and