f our life which our whole soul revolts from contemplating? Why
has Nature made these passions so strong that she seems wholly
regardless of all considerations of morality?[41]

Some there are who feel that all infidel books are mere curl-paper in
comparison with the terrible facts of life, some who are in danger of
having all faith crushed out of them--

"Beneath the weary and the heavy weight
Of all this unintelligible world."

It is these who need, like myself, as a first step to strong action, to
see something of what God is working out by the evil and suffering of
the world, to see it as a part of a vast redemptive whole, not as a
great exception in our life, but working under the same law by which, in
the words of the ancient collect, "things which are cast down are being
raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new, and all
things are returning to perfection through Him from whom they had their
origin."

Now, do not think that I am going to indulge in a dissertation on the
origin of evil or why the world is so full of sin and misery. This is
insoluble. You cannot solve a problem which has only one term. Your
unknown quantity must have some known factor or factors related to it,
or you cannot resolve it into the known. In this great claim of cause
and effect, where all things are related and interdependent, you can
only know a related thing through its relations. Try to account for a
bit of chalk, for instance, and consider all you must know in order to
enable you to do so. To account for its weight you must know something
about the motion of the whole planetary system and the law of gravity
that controls that system; to account for the weather-stains upon it,
you must know something about chemical reaction; to account for its
being chalk and not flint, you must know something of the geological
ages of the earth, and how it comes to be built up of little sea-shells;
to account for its hardness, you must know something of the intricacies
of molecular physics. All this you must know to account for a mere bit
of chalk. How, then, can we expect to understand the problem of the
world when we know absolutely nothing of its relations with the great
moral and spiritual whole to which it belongs, and without the knowledge
of which it must for ever remain an insoluble problem, presenting one
term only, an enigma of which we do not possess the key?

But though we cannot understand the origin of e