All this is not so unmeaning and perverse as it at first appears. There is a reason why our generation--the happiest and, we will hope, perhaps, on the whole, the best the world has yet seen--should scan the dread problem of Evil with other eyes than its predecessors; and there are reasons, far from ignoble, why happy men and women should find it harder to justify the ways of God to the miserable than those miserable ones themselves to do so on their own account. In the first place, our generation shrinks from the sight of physical anguish in a way obviously unknown to our progenitors, who could ride gayly on their daily errands under gallows-trees loaded each with its sickening weight, or city gates decorated by decapitated heads; and who could feast and sleep in the chambers of feudal castles while under their floors miserable prisoners were pining in dungeons, or perhaps expiring amid the unutterable horrors of the _oubliette_. They could stand by as unmoved spectators, or throw fresh fagots on the piles where heretics and witches were burning, and shout applause when half-hanged traitors were cut down from the rope to be drawn and quartered. Oppressions and injustices done by the strong against the weak were matters of every-day experience in every town, almost in every parish and household. If such things seem to us calculated to provoke vehement indignation and rebellion against every Power above or below which sanctioned or permitted them, it must be asked _who_ was there in those days likely to feel any similar indignation? The laws were not more cruel than the men who made them, nor the legislators than the mass of the nation. This being the case, how should those who thought it right and just that their fellows should endure such tortures find anything mysterious in the severest decrees of Providence? The order of nature--harsh to the eyes of a John Stuart Mill or a Shelley--must have been mild enough to those of the _habitués_ of autos-da-fé, or even let us say to the nobles of France under that _ancien régime_ of which M. Taine has given us the picture.