"During my recent visit to Greenville I visited a mill, the largest of its kind in the country. In one room was a machine, something like a huge straw-cutter, working with great power. In another room was a large steam boiler hung upon a shaft and made slowly to revolve while filled with steam. In a third room were large oval tanks, or cisterns, which might be filled with water. Across each tank was a heavy shaft carrying a drum set with steel blades, and as the drum revolved these blades passed other blades in the bottom of the tank, cutting whatever came between like scissors. In a fourth room were certain long and complicated machines. Each machine was composed mostly of rollers. There were large rollers and small rollers, solid rollers of enormous weight, and hollow rollers to be heated by steam within. Over and around a portion of these rollers passed a broad wirecloth belt. Over others passed a like belt of felted cloth. With these machines before you, could you tell me whether the inventor were a wise and skillful machinist?" "How could we tell," asked Peter, "without knowing what kind of work the machine was designed to do?" "You could not tell," answered Mr. Wilton; "you would need to know both what the machine was designed to do and all the processes by which the work was to be carried on. This brings out the first point which I wish you to fix in mind. It is this: To judge of the wisdom of any contrivance, we must understand the purpose, or object, which the inventor had in view; we must understand the work to be accomplished, and also the difficulties to be overcome. An ordinary locomotive steam-engine is admirably fitted to run on iron rails, but he would be a foolish man who should purchase such an engine to draw a train of loaded wagons over a common road of earth. On such a road it could not even move itself. It is good for that for which it was made, and for nothing else. How would you apply this principle to the subject we are now considering? You may answer, Samuel." "I think you mean," said Samuel, "that, in order to judge of the wisdom and goodness of God in creating and governing this world, we must know the object he had in view in making such a world." "That is my meaning, and I am glad that you understand me so perfectly. If this world were created with no other object than to be the grazing-field for herds of cattle, which see no difference between the beauty of the violet and the dull shapelessness of the cold earth upon which it grows, and never lift their eyes above the horizon, then all the beauty of earth and sky would be useless; there would be no wisdom or goodness in the creation of this beauty. There would be no wisdom or goodness in laying up in store beds of coal, buried deep beneath the surface of the earth, if God designed the world to be inhabited only by savages too rude and ignorant ever to mine it, and turn it to some practical use.