When all corrections and deductions are made, a residue of profound, awful, inexplicable misery--misery of sinful man and misery of sinless brutes--remains, alas! to form, doubtless, in time to come, as in the ages which are past, the dread “Riddle of the painful Earth.” We must expect it to press upon us ever more and more in proportion as our sense of justice and love rises higher, and our sympathies with unmerited suffering grow more acute. Whether the shadow which that mystery casts on religion will hereafter be in any degree relieved by fresh lights obtained through sounder theories of Nature, it were idle to guess. One thing seems clear enough; namely, that the spirit wherewith some modern Pessimists approach the tremendous problem is one which can never lead to its solution, and which in itself is calculated to form no inconsiderable addition to the gloom of human existence. The world, to all who enter it, is very much what their anticipations make of it,--full of matter for joy and gratitude, or for repining and discontent. It appears beautiful or dreary, according as they regard it through the cloudless, childlike eyes of cheerful trust or through the dim and distorting spectacles of doubt and despair. No generation so miserable has yet seen the light as one which should be trained to expect neither justice nor love from God, and to “cultivate a connected view of the general despicability of mankind.” After all, as Schopenhauer himself confessed (though he cared so little to practise the lesson), character--or, as Mr. Matthew Arnold would say, conduct--is the great matter to which all theories are subordinate. “Moral goodness belongs to an order of things which is above this life, and is incommensurable with any other perfection.” There is a certain value in the old test whereby a tree is known by its fruits. To such of us as have kept any foundations of faith still standing, the presumption is surely enormous that the intellectual system which naturally produces courage, trustfulness, and loving-kindness, must be nearer to the Eternal Verities than the blighting theory which brings forth such thorns and thistles as deformed the character of the great Pessimist Philosopher of the nineteenth century. FOOTNOTES: [14] _Life_, p. 80. [15] _Life_, p. 32. [16] _Ethics_, Book IV., chap. iii. [17] _Life_, p. 208. [18] _Contemporary Review_, February, 1873. [19] _Life_, p. 108. [20] _Life_, p. 240. ZOOPHILY.