If we unduly gratify the taste, the tongue is the very first to show that the stomach is “out of order,” and this disharmony is felt in the whole body. Sometimes we have done wrong, or have seen others do wrong apparently with profit; but the wider view will always show that the way of the transgressor is as hard as his heart, that the wicked man is in truth the fool. We know that any attempt that man makes to disturb the right order for the sake of any separate interest must react upon himself, destroying his own happiness as well as the happiness of those about him. Similarly we see that the prophet, the cultivator, the inventor, the martyr, the benevolent man, each doing what he is inspired to do, is working just as much for all mankind as for himself, that he cannot reap the benefit except as others share it. For our good, we are joined together in one connected whole, so that no man liveth, or so much as dieth, to himself. We see how the Spirit makes “even the wrath of men to praise him” that the tyranny of a king was necessary to drive out colonists to proclaim liberty, and the fierce rivalry of nations in armament is needed to usher in a Court of International Peace. Since that is so, since we know that in great or universal affairs the eternal purposes cannot be interfered with, why should we think that it fails to work in our own little interests? We see beautiful, symmetrical shells and well-adapted organs in creatures so small that we know of their existence only through high-power microscopes. In them we find the same rule of law, the same adaptation to supreme ends that we find in the measureless suns and in the measureless souls of men. Accordingly, when what seems evil “happens,” as we say, to us, upon what principle can we conclude that this is an exception, that in this case something has occurred that ought not to have occurred? If one thing went wrong in the divine intent, it would show a limit to the rule of Good. We know that there can be no such limit. It is not fatalism to believe that the same holy order rules over us, for each of us and each of our efforts is a part of the divine plan, and a means of carrying it out. We should strive for those things that seem to us desirable and good; although we may not have success, as we call it, so kind is the constitution of things that the effort to direct things right dulls the pain of finding that the event shapes itself in a way that we do not like. We are threatened, perhaps, with what seems a horrible disaster: why, the very derivation of the word disaster refers to the influence which the stars are supposed to have upon our destinies. Some power there is that controls those destinies, in spite of our human limitations of time and space. Who would take the job, though he had the power, of controlling even the material world, arranging the growth of plants, the rise and fall of nations, the birth and waning of the stars?