This is not a perfect world. It was not perfect even when originally constituted. Its imperfection is due to sin. God made it with reference to the Fall,—the stage was arranged for the great drama of sin and redemption which was to be enacted thereon. We accept Bushnell’s idea of “anticipative consequences,” and would illustrate it by the building of a hospital-room while yet no member of the family is sick, and by the salvation of the patriarchs through a Christ yet to come. If the earliest vertebrates of geological history were types of man and preparations for his coming, then pain and death among those same vertebrates may equally have been a type of man’s sin and its results of misery. If sin had not been an incident, foreseen and provided for, the world might have been a paradise. As a matter of fact, it will become a paradise only at the completion of the redemptive work of Christ. Kreibig, Versöhnung, 369—“The death of Christ was accompanied by startling occurrences in the outward world, to show that the effects of his sacrifice reached even into nature.” Perowne refers _Ps. 96:10_—“_The world also is established that it cannot be moved_”—to the restoration of the inanimate creation; _cf._ _Heb. 12:27_—“_And this word, Yet once more, signifieth the removing of those things that are shaken, as of things that have been made, that those things which are not shaken may remain_”; _Rev. 21:1, 5_—“_a new heaven and a new earth ... Behold, I make all things new._” Much sport has been made of this doctrine of anticipative consequences. James D. Dana: “It is funny that the sin of Adam should have killed those old trilobites! The blunderbuss must have kicked back into time at a tremendous rate to have hit those poor innocents!” Yet every insurance policy, every taking out of an umbrella, every buying of a wedding ring, is an anticipative consequence. To deny that God made the world what it is in view of the events that were to take place in it, is to concede to him less wisdom than we attribute to our fellow-man. The most rational explanation of physical evil in the universe is that of _Rom. 8:20, 21_—“_the creation was subjected to vanity ... by reason of him who subjected it_”—_i. e._, by reason of the first man’s sin—“_in hope that the creation itself also shall be delivered_.”