Take evils of accident to begin with. An aged man slips on the ice, falls, breaks a bone, and is left, like Epictetus, lame for life. The particular application of the law of gravitation in this case has unfortunate results for the individual. But the law is good. We should not know how to get along in the world without this beneficent law. Shall we repine and complain against the law that holds the stars and planets in their courses, shapes the mountains, sways the tides, brings down the rain, and draws the rivers to the sea, turning ten thousand mill-wheels of industry as it goes rejoicing on its way; shall we complain against this law because in one instance in a thousand million it chances to throw down an individual, which happens to be me, and breaks a bone or two of mine, and leaves me for the brief span of my remaining pilgrimage with a limping gait? If Epictetus could say to his cruel master under torture, "You will break my leg if you keep on," and then when it broke could smilingly add, "I told you so,"--cannot we endure with fortitude, and even grateful joy, the incidental inflictions which so beneficent a master as the great law of gravitation in its magnificent impartiality may see fit to mete out to us? A current of electricity, seeking its way from sky to earth, finds on some particular occasion the body of a beloved husband, a dear son, an honoured father of dependent children, the best conductor between the air and the earth, and kills the person through whose body it takes its swift and fatal course. Yet this law has no malevolence in its impartial heart. On the contrary the beneficent potency of the laws of electricity is so great that our largest hopes for the improvement of our economic condition rest on its unexplored resources. A group of bacteria, ever alert to find matter not already appropriated and held in place by vital forces stronger than their own, find their food and breeding place within a human body, and subject our friend or our child to weeks of fever, and perchance to death. Yet we cannot call evil the great biological law that each organism shall seek its meat from God wherever it can find it. Indeed were it not for these micro-organisms, and their alertness to seize upon and transform into their own living substance everything morbid and unwholesome, the whole earth would be nothing but a vast charnel house reeking with the intolerable stench of the undisintegrated and unburied dead.