To know—to see clearly—to understand that one paragraph, who would not be willing to go hence to-night? For if it is God and immortality, there would be no fears, doubts, pitiless days of self communion, ending in that pale despair which strikes into the soul of every man whose soul is his own and who thinks. And if it is all Chance (a thought repellant and unbelievable to one who thinks), or even the Great Unchance of fixed, immutable, but unloving and uncaring Law—as many believe—then why suffer to this palsied, dust-turning end? [Illustration: GENERAL LEW WALLACE] From the lips of babes, from the humble and the ignorant, what wisdom! Here is some of it: On a morning after a cyclone where I once lived, amid the death of nearly threescore people, and the wreck of homes, a friend met an old negro, whose wife and children had been killed, and his home blown away. There was the usual compassion and condolence and trust from the learned man, who had lost nothing. But the old negro said: “Marster, the man that you calls God—yo’ God—it ’pears to me that he do about as much harm as he do good!” I have wondered since—often and often—if our God—the God our little minds have been able to grasp—to whom some people falsely attribute revenge and cruelty and murder—if he is not as the old negro said; and I have prayed that I might live to know the God Which Is, and that he would permit me to understand the things which do stagger me now! Were these things really chances? Take each one of them and sift it to its very beginning—follow up the broad stream of each till you find the first drop of its water trickling over the blind bluff of the thing unknown which staggers and stops you, and even to that last tiny drop you will stand and find no answer to the question, and before that drop you will stop again, look up at the stars and ask the same question: “Is it Chance, is it Law, or is it God?” Let us take the first one: Why was Buell a day late? A thousand little things—a march from Nashville to Savannah, planned with ample time, yet delayed. What delays? Hundreds of them—follow up any one of them and it will end in the drop.