of God’s _first intention_.” Stoics, and Christians who imitate Stoics, may call these things “indifferent:” I cannot. And even if I could, what of the ferocity, and cruelty, and exultation in destruction, which are apparent in the animal world? “Death,” say the Stoics, “is the mere exit from life.” Is it? I was once present at a theatre in Rouen where the hero took a full quarter of an hour to die of poison, and the young Normans who sat round me expressed their strenuous disapprobation: “C’est trop long,” they murmured. I have made the same remonstrance in my heart of hearts, ever since I was a boy and saw a cat play with a mouse, and a patient stoat hunt down and catch at last a tired-out rabbit: “It is too long,” “It is too cruel.” “Did God ordain this?”—I asked: and I answered unhesitatingly “No.” These are but small phenomena in Nature’s chamber of horrors: but for me they have always been, and will always remain, horrible. I believe that God intends us to regard them with horror and perhaps to see in them some faint reflection of the wantonly destructive and torturing instinct in man. Those are fine-sounding lines, those of Cleanthes:— οἰδέ τι γίγνεται ἔργον ἐπὶ χθονὶ σου δίχα, δαῖμον, πλὴν ὅποσα ῥέζουσι κακοὶ σφετέρῃσιν ἀνοίαις.[6] I should like to agree with them; but I cannot. The picture of the cat and the mouse appears—fertile in suggestions. “This at least,” I say, “was not wrought by ‘evil men in their folly;’ and yet it did not come direct from God.” Isaiah pleases me better with his prediction, physiologically absurd, but spiritually most true: “The lion shall eat straw like a bullock.” That is just the confession that I need: it comes to me with all the force of a divine acknowledgment, as if God thereby said: “Death and conflict must be for a time, but they shall not be for ever: it was not my intention, it is not my will, that my creatures should thrive by destroying each other.”