There is endless backwoodsman's work yet to be done, If "those also serve who only stand and wait," still more do those who sweep and cleanse; and if any man elect to give his strength to the weeder's and scavenger's occupation, I remain of the opinion that his service should be counted acceptable, and that no one has a right to ask more of him than faithful performance of the duties he has undertaken. I venture to count it an improbable suggestion that any such person--a man, let us say, who has well-nigh reached his threescore years and ten, and has graduated in all the faculties of human relationships; who has taken his share in all the deep joys and deeper anxieties which cling about them; who has felt the burden of young lives entrusted to his care, and has stood alone with his dead before the abyss of the eternal--has never had a thought beyond negative criticism. It seems to me incredible that such an one can have done his day's work, always with a light heart, with no sense of responsibility, no terror of that which may appear when the factitious veil of Isis--the thick web of fiction man has woven round nature--is stripped off. [Challenged to state his "mental bias, pro or con," with regard to such matters as Creation, Providence, etc., he reiterates his words written thirty-two years before:--] So far back as 1860 I wrote:-- "The doctrine of special creation owes its existence very largely to the supposed necessity of making science accord with the Hebrew cosmogony"; and that the hypothesis of special creation is, in my judgment, a "mere specious mask for our ignorance." Not content with negation, I said:-- "Harmonious order governing eternally continuous progress; the web and woof of matter and force interweaving by slow degrees, without a broken thread, that veil which lies between us and the infinite; that universe which alone we know, or can know; such is the picture which science draws of the world." Every reader of Goethe will know that the second is little more than a paraphrase of the well-known utterance of the "Zeitgeist" in "Faust", which surely is something more than a mere negation of the clumsy anthropomorphism of special creation. Follows a query about "Providence," my answer to which must depend upon what my questioner means by that substantive, whether alone, or qualified by the adjective "moral."