something in the main good. The same explanation applies to even the most conspicuous of the evils which afflict society. War, it may be said, and said truly, is a tremendous example of evil, in the misery, hardship, waste of human life, and mis-spending of human energies, which it occasions. But what is it that produces war? Certain tendencies of human nature, as keen assertion of a supposed right, resentment of supposed injury, acquisitiveness, desire of admiration, combativeness, or mere love of excitement. All of these are tendencies which are every day, in a legitimate extent of action, producing great and indispensable benefits to us. Man would be a tame, indolent, unserviceable being without them, and his fate would be starvation. War, then, huge evil though it be, is, after all, but the exceptive case, a casual misdirection of properties and powers essentially good. God has given us the tendencies for a benevolent purpose. He has only not laid down any absolute obstruction to our misuse of them. That were an arrangement of a kind which he has nowhere made. But he has established many laws in our nature which tend to lessen the frequency and destructiveness of these abuses. Our reason comes to see that war is purely an evil, even to the conqueror. Benevolence interposes to make its ravages less mischievous to human comfort, and less destructive to human life. Men begin to find that their more active powers can be exercised with equal gratification on legitimate objects; for example, in overcoming the natural difficulties of their path through life, or in a generous spirit of emulation in a line of duty beneficial to themselves and their fellow-creatures. Thus, war at length shrinks into a comparatively narrow compass, though there certainly is no reason to suppose that it will be at any early period, if ever, altogether dispensed with, while man’s constitution remains as it is. In considering an evil of this kind, we must not limit our view to our own or any past time. Placed upon the earth with faculties prepared to act, but inexperienced, and with the more active propensities necessarily in great force to suit the condition of the globe, man was apt to misuse his powers much in this way at first, compared with what he is likely to do when he advances into a condition of civilization. In the scheme of providence, thousands of years of frequent warfare, all the so-called glories which fill history, may be only an exception to the general rule.