been the prime cause and continual sustenance of that
evil scepticism which is the Nemesis of meddling with the
unknowable.

Cinderella is modestly conscious of her ignorance of these
high matters. She lights the fire, sweeps the house, and
provides the dinner; and is rewarded by being told that she is
a base creature, devoted to low and material interests. But in
her garret she has fairy visions out of the ken of the pair
of shrews who are quarrelling downstairs. She sees the order
which pervades the seeming disorder of the world; the great
drama of evolution, with its full share of pity and terror,
but also with abundant goodness and beauty, unrolls itself
before her eyes; and she learns, in her heart of hearts, the
lesson, that the foundation of morality is to have done, once
and for all, with lying; to give up pretending to believe that
for which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible
propositions about things beyond the possibilities of
knowledge.

She knows that the safety of morality lies neither in the
adoption of this or that philosophical speculation, or this
or that theological creed, but in a real and living belief in
that fixed order of nature which sends social disorganization
upon the track of immorality, as surely as it sends physical
disease after physical trespasses. And of that firm and lively
faith it is her high mission to be the priestess.

In a world the elements of which are thus mixed with pity and terror,
goodness and beauty, he held himself, like the majority of men, as
neither optimist nor pessimist. "The world is neither so good, nor so
bad, as it conceivably might be; and as most of us have reason, now
and again, to discover that it can be."

On the one side, the optimistic dogma that this is the best of all
possible worlds is little better than a libel on possibility. On
behalf of the modified optimism that benevolence is on the whole the
regulating principle of the sentient world, it may be granted that
there are hosts of subtle contrivances devoted to the production of
pleasure and the avoidance of pain; but, if so, why is it not equally
proper to say of the equally numerous arrangements, the no less
necessary result of which is the production of pain, that they are
evidences of malevolence? Translating these facts into moral
terms, the goodness of the hand that aids Bla