edingly stout person, one who is "in his own way"
curses God for making him so stout. The thin person has a similar
grievance. Those who are too large and those who are too small are
equally dissatisfied. The shape of an eye, the curve of the mouth, a
blemish here, an impediment there, is the direct cause of poignant
embarrassment. Organs or dimensions too unsightly and unsatisfactory are
productive of continual worry and torment throughout our lives. The
blind, the deaf, the dumb and the crippled have forever a curse for God
upon their lips.

We inhabit the air, with a density of fifteen pounds to the square inch,
a mixture of dirt and water, in the same manner that the fish inhabits
the water and the worm the earth. Were we beings of a superior type,
Nature would have made us so versatile that we should be able to
accustom ourselves to any condition, and survive in any climate. But
despite all our improvements, despite all man's efforts to avoid and
escape the conditions of Nature, many of us freeze to death in winter
and become prostrate from the heat of summer. If it were true that the
earth were purposely made and existing for us there would be "no flowers
born to blush unseen and waste their sweetness on the desert air."

We, ourselves, scientists tell us, are the result of a long series of
evolutionary development. They tell us that Nature started with a single
cell of protoplasm, a single cell of living organism, and produced the
present human species after the life and death of an illimitable number
of forms through the stages of countless ages, not exempting those lives
from the fear, torture and misery that are still so essential a part of
the scheme of life. Why impose so cruel and wasteful a condition upon
those numberless billions that have lived before us, since nothing but
eternal death was gained by their existence?

Surely, Nature is a poor architect and builder, after taking so much
material and so much time, to make such an incomplete place for such an
outlandish form to rule and occupy. If we were given the same
opportunity (that is, you and I), with all the power and resources of
Nature, to build a habitable place, and mold a living something to
inhabit it, our results would be ten thousand times better than that
which circles the scope and boundary of our lives, with the
incomprehensible physical form with which we breathe and manifest life.

Truthfully, and without the slightest element of ego