"The inhabitants of this world are also liable at all times to diseases and destructive accidents. This condition of things could not be changed without changing the entire structure and plan of the world. Is that a fit dwelling-place for a sinless being where chilling winds one day shrivel his skin and fill his bones with rheumatic pains, and the next, sweltering heats pervade all his system with languid lassitude--where miasma lies in wait unseen to poison his blood, kindle the malignant fever, and bring him to the shades of death, and every form of accident crouches in ambush, ready to spring upon his victim unawares and tear him limb from limb? We cannot see that the absence of sin would dissipate this liability to disease and the danger of accidents. Nay, this liability and danger are written upon the very constitution of the human body. The finger of God has engraved it upon every muscle and bone and life-cell. The Creator gave the body that wonderful power called the _vis medicatrix_--the power of recovering from injuries and repairing damage done to itself. Pull a leg from a grasshopper and another grows in its place. By this we know that the Creator understood the liability of this little insect to lose a limb, and prepared him for it. In like manner the power in man's body to heal a wound or join a broken bone gives us to understand that the Creator expected man to live in the midst of danger. The precaution proves the risk. "These accidents are such as no possible carefulness could guard against. To say nothing of the fact that all our knowledge of these perils comes from a painful experience of danger and death, what care, even after ages of sad experience, could ward off the thunderbolt? What carefulness could guard against the tornado on the land, or the hurricane and the cyclone upon the sea? Who should stand sentinel against the unseen poison borne upon the wings of the wind? What power should save him from the bursting of the volcano and the jaws of the earthquake? What care could give him knowledge of the qualities of all natural substances, that he might avoid their dangerous properties? We can suppose a divine care over man that should do all this and save men from harm, but it would be a providence superseding all human knowledge and exertion--it must be a providence to which the human race is now a stranger; miracles would then be the rule, and the undisturbed course of Nature the exception. "If, however, we suppose that God designed the world as a training-school, so to speak, of fallen beings, such as the word of God declares the human race to be, all is plain, everything is suitable and harmonious. We can see the fitness of at least the chief outlines of man's earthly condition, and can perceive God's wisdom and goodness in the constitution of the world.