humanity, we see that in the phenomena of disease we
are confronted, not with inertness fighting against motion, but with
one kind of life, which is inimical to human life, fighting with
another kind of life which is favourable to health. I mean that when a
fever or a cancer lays hold of a human frame, it is nothing but the
lodging inside the body of a bacterial and an infusorial life which
fights against the healthy native life of the human organism. There
must be, I will not say a consciousness, but a sense of triumphant
life, in the cancer which feeds upon the limb, in spite of all efforts
to dislodge it; and it is impossible to me to believe that the vitality
of those parasitical organisms, which prey upon the human frame, is not
derived from the vital impulse of God. We, who live in the free air
and the sun, have a way of thinking and speaking as if the plants and
animals which develop under the same conditions were of a healthy type,
while the organisms which flourish in decay and darkness, such as the
fungi of which I saw so strange an example, the larva; which prey on
decaying matter, the soft and pallid worm-like forms that tunnel in
vegetable ooze, were of an unhealthy type. But yet these creatures are
as much the work of God as the flowers and trees, the brisk animals
which we love to see about us. We are obliged in self-defence to do
battle with the creatures which menace our health; we do not question
our right to deprive them of life for our own comfort; but surely with
this analogy before us, we are equally compelled to think of the forms
of moral evil, with all their dark vitality, as the work of God's hand.
It is a sad conclusion to be obliged to draw, but I can have no doubt
that no comprehensive system of philosophy can ever be framed, which
does not trace the vitality of what we call evil to the same hand as
the vitality of what we call good. I have no doubt myself of the
supremacy of a single power; but the explanation that evil came into
the world by the institution of free-will, and that suffering is the
result of sin, seems to me to be wholly inadequate, because the mystery
of strife and pain and death is "far older than any history which is
written in any book." The mistake that we make is to count up all the
qualities which seem to promote our health and happiness, and to invent
an anthropomorphic figure of God, whom we array upon the side which we
wish to prevail. The truth is far darke