Take, again, a more typical case of what I mean by luck. It came under my own notice. A cloth-worker in Yorkshire, by carelessness or inadvertence, raises the nap of a given fabric a shade above the regulation height. He is dismissed, and the cloth is laid aside as spoiled. A French buyer comes in the place, and casting his eyes on it, instantly sees for it a future. That touch of heightened nap has done it. The manufacturer has his wits about him, and what a week before was a mistake is now a new and valuable design which, in a couple of years, makes him what some of us would regard as a substantial fortune. We are usually told that to admit the operation of this questionable factor in human affairs, called chance or luck, is inconsistent with a belief in the moral government of God, or, as we may prefer to call it, the reign of law. If this is so, how are we to read those old words that "chance happeneth to them all"? If we seriously contend that everything which happens in our human life is in accord with God's plans in us, and working through us, then I see not how we can refuse to hold such fore-ordination responsible for the grotesque, the irrational, the sinister, and the wicked in our actions. I could understand the objection were it limited to Nature, because that is a sphere in which it is the uses of things, and the uses precisely, which are the most obvious, and these compose, when taken together, a mighty reciprocal whole in which part answers to part, constituting an all-comprehensive and wondrous whole. There is no place in Nature for chance. Every particle of air is governed by laws of as great precision as the laws of the heavenly bodies. It keeps its appointed order, it serves its appointed ends. Nature never breaks out of its place. It has no such power--but human nature has. Man has enough free-will to make him responsible for what he does with it, and in the exercise of this mighty prerogative enters the element of chance or luck. We cannot establish free-will by rules of logic, we cannot gainsay it on the score of conviction. It helps us to interpret the great in human life and history, and what is sometimes even more to the purpose, it helps us to account for the little. As it has been well said: "It would save us much mental perplexity if we could assert without qualification that all is law, that everything happens as God ordains." But God cannot make two mountains without a valley between; and He cannot give us free-will and withhold from us at the same time the freedom to make mistakes. The contradictions in human life do not yield to verbal simplicities, and, whether we like it or not, we have to acknowledge that this something called luck is a force in human events.