"Why, then," some may ask, "does God combine His energies to form a poisonous rattlesnake?" God has expressed everything imaginable; the beautiful and ugly, the safe and harmful, the pleasant and painful, the gentle and terrible, and all these are but the alphabet of a soul. If He had given us nothing but abstract definitions, we never should have learned the meaning of anything; and scarcely more, if He had given us only the beautiful and pleasant without their opposites. But He has made us _feel_ the meaning, so that it may be real to us. From this marvelous alphabet which He has provided, we learn to spell, then to read, and finally to live. When we have learned the meaning of poison and its opposite, we may kill the rattlesnake, or cause its energies to dissolve and pass into something more beautiful and safe. Thus we become more and more immune from all that is ugly and harmful, and more appreciatively attached to all that is beautiful and good. The ugly and harmful were desirable things to know in contrast with the beautiful and good, that we might reject the one, and cleave to the other. The deeper meaning of things thus learned will give significance to our beautiful world long after we have passed beyond the evil which we have come to loathe. I am entirely convinced that this so-called evil world with its epidemics, earthquakes, and cyclones is the best conceivable place in which to _begin_ a soul; not the best possible world as yet, for it is our business to help make it better. Neither should we forget that the terrible is often the overture to us of some mighty, beneficent energy which we have not yet learned to use. Again we affirm that God is doing everything that occurs in the universe, except those things which are being done by His children. Nothing ever occurs that is not directly or indirectly the act of some will. 5. If the Ancients made their gods, how do we know that we are not making our God?