"The pain and woe-producing agencies of Nature are seen to be not at all contradictory to goodness, but on the other hand eminently wise and righteous. The whole sum of human misery expresses God's displeasure at sin. By their sufferings men learn how abhorrent is sin in God's sight. By the consequences of evil-doing they learn not to transgress. As none are free from the taint of depravity, none are free from pains. The necessity of labor--one of the elements of the primal curse--is a check to sin on the part of the vicious, and a discipline and trial to virtue on the part of the penitent. The multiform trials of life--which can indeed be borne well only by the grace of God--while they teach the evil of sin and keep the heart chastened and subdued, nourish heroic and dauntless virtue in the faithful. 'Daily cares' become 'a heavenly discipline.' Dangers and calamities startle the stupid conscience, and keep alive the sense of responsibility to God on the part of the wicked; they quicken the sense of weakness and dependence in the believing and educate their faith in God. The more sudden and overwhelming these evils, and the more these dangers are placed beyond the possibility of being warded off by human care, the more do they awaken in men a sense of the divine presence and of responsibility to God. "But would not all these natural agencies subserve essentially the same ends in the discipline of unfallen and sinless beings? By no means. If sufferings came upon a sinless being, he could not feel that they came as chastisements; he could not feel them to be deserved. They would be to him a 'curse causeless,' and hence would bring no advantage. He could only cry out in astonishment, 'Father, why am I, thine obedient son, thus smitten?' Calamity falling upon the innocent would be an anomaly in the universe. But now the sufferer, pierced through and through with a sense of ill desert, meekly bows his head, murmuring, 'Father, all thy judgments are just and right.'