Empedocles imagined; none except in the sense in which a man who gets his leg broken is a monster. A monster is simply a being to whom an accident not fatal has happened in the womb. Why should an accident not occur there as well as elsewhere? Why should God not act by general laws there as well as elsewhere? Who is entitled to say that any result of His general laws is a failure; that any so-called accident was not included in His plan; that a world in which a child could not be born deformed nor a grown man have a leg broken, would be, were all things taken into account, as good as the world in which we actually live? Huxley, Lange, and those whom they represent, have failed to show us any of nature's "bullets which have missed the mark," and have not sufficiently, I think, realised how imperfect might be their own perception of nature's target. The contrivances for the infliction of pain and death displayed in the structure of animals of prey are none the less evidences of intelligence because they are not also, at least immediately or directly, evidences of beneficence. Intelligence is one thing, benevolence is another, and what conclusively disproved benevolence might conclusively prove intelligence.[44] [44] See Appendix XXXIII. II. Let us pass on to the contemplation of greater difficulties; to suffering, which seems to conflict with the benevolence of God--and to sin, which seems irreconcilable with His righteousness. I cannot agree with those who think that there is no mystery in mere pain; that it is sufficiently accounted for by moral evil, and involves no separate problem. The history of suffering began on our planet long before that of sin; ages prior to the appearance of man, earth was a scene of war and mutual destruction; hunger and fear, violence and agony, disease and death, have prevailed throughout the air, the land, and ocean, ever since they were tenanted. And what connection in reason can there be between the sin of men or the sin of angels and the suffering endured or inflicted by primeval saurians? The suffering of the animals is, in fact, more mysterious than the suffering of man, just because so little of the former and so much of the latter can be traced, directly or indirectly, to sin. But every animal is made subject to suffering; every animal appetite springs out of a want; every sense and every faculty of every animal are so constituted as to be in certain circumstances sources of pain; hosts of animals are so constructed that they can only live by rending and devouring other animals; no large animal can move without crushing and killing numbers of minute yet sentient creatures. How can all this be under the government of Infinite Goodness?