er he has ability or
not, his father has position and influence." This hints to us why
certain men, if they do not fill, yet hold the positions they do. Take
some men in high places, say in the political world. Recall a few
names, if you can, of men who have held great positions in the State
within the last quarter of a century, and does any sane person contend
that in ability they stand out sheer above ten thousand good average
men who crowd about them? I think it was Sydney Smith who said it was
about equal to being canonized to marry into certain families. And a
man would need to be a very emphasized fool quite to spoil the
advantages of a long line of position, privilege, and family ascendency.

Take, again, a more typical case of what I mean by luck. It came under
my own notice. A cloth-worker in Yorkshire, by carelessness or
inadvertence, raises the nap of a given fabric a shade above the
regulation height. He is dismissed, and the cloth is laid aside as
spoiled. A French buyer comes in the place, and casting his eyes on
it, instantly sees for it a future. That touch of heightened nap has
done it. The manufacturer has his wits about him, and what a week
before was a mistake is now a new and valuable design which, in a
couple of years, makes him what some of us would regard as a
substantial fortune. We are usually told that to admit the operation
of this questionable factor in human affairs, called chance or luck, is
inconsistent with a belief in the moral government of God, or, as we
may prefer to call it, the reign of law. If this is so, how are we to
read those old words that "chance happeneth to them all"? If we
seriously contend that everything which happens in our human life is in
accord with God's plans in us, and working through us, then I see not
how we can refuse to hold such fore-ordination responsible for the
grotesque, the irrational, the sinister, and the wicked in our actions.
I could understand the objection were it limited to Nature, because
that is a sphere in which it is the uses of things, and the uses
precisely, which are the most obvious, and these compose, when taken
together, a mighty reciprocal whole in which part answers to part,
constituting an all-comprehensive and wondrous whole. There is no
place in Nature for chance. Every particle of air is governed by laws
of as great precision as the laws of the heavenly bodies. It keeps its
appointed order, it serves its appointed