In my comments upon Dr. Illingworth's views regarding "Divine Immanence" I fear I have digressed somewhat from the subject at present under consideration--the Theistic argument from a Beneficent Intelligence. "The ethical argument held a very subordinate place in the estimation of writers on natural theology until Kant rested on it almost the whole weight of Theism. It has ever since been prominent, and has been the argument most relied upon to produce practical conviction." [216] What was once the weakest argument has now become the strongest. Why? Not, I take it, because anything has occurred to make the weaker any stronger, but because what was thought to be the strongest is now found to be weaker than the weakest! How can the ethical argument be maintained in face of objections which continue to become ever graver as our knowledge increases? Theists contend [217] that there must be a future life if only because the glaring wrongs of this world have to be righted. What is this but a naïve admission that the proofs of the Deity's benevolence are sadly wanting? EVIL FOR WHICH MAN IS NOT HELD RESPONSIBLE. The problem of pain, and of evil generally, has been partially discussed in the chapter on "Evolution." The importance of this problem is very great, for, by the universal consent of Christendom (not of mankind, as we shall see later on), the very name of God carries with it the sense of goodness, the highest and best that we know of or can imagine. For this reason it is customary for the pious to regard every calamity reverently as a punishment from God, or as serving some good purpose. Thus the German Emperor, imbued from childhood with this pious theory, warned his people that the Japanese had been sent as a scourge from God, and Father Bernard Vaughan (preaching at Lancaster on August 26th, 1906) declared that God had uttered warnings to England by the eruption of Vesuvius and the San Franciscan and Chilian earthquakes. Can this supposition be maintained when the catastrophe occurs in the wrong place, when tornadoes and earthquakes destroy God's own temples, and when the innocent suffer for the guilty? With the opinion of the scientist we are, or ought to be by now, familiar. "The fundamental axiom of scientific thought is that there is not, never has been, and never will be, any disorder in Nature. The admission of the occurrence of any event which was not the logical consequence of the immediately antecedent events, according to those definite, ascertained, or unascertained rules which we call the 'laws of Nature,' would be an act of self-destruction on the part of science" (Huxley on Catastrophes, p. 247 of his Essays on Controverted Questions).