gle instance, the seeming waste, of human
thought, of human agony, of human power, seems but another instance of
that inscrutable prodigality of nature, by which, of a thousand acorns
dropping to the ground, but one shall become the thing it can become, and
grow into a builder oak, the rest be craunched up by the nearest swine.

Yet these dark passages of human life may be only necessary elements of
the complex education of our race; and as much mercy under a fearful
shape, as ours when we put the child we love under the surgeon's knife.
At least we may believe so; believe that they have a moral end, though
that end be unseen by us; and without any rash or narrow prying into
final causes (a trick as fatal to historic research as Bacon said it was
to science), we may justify God by faith, where we cannot justify Him by
experience.

Surely this will be the philosophic method. If we seem to ourselves to
have discovered a law, we do not throw it away the moment we find
phaenomena which will not be explained by it. We use those phaenomena to
correct and to expand our law. And this belief that History is 'God
educating man,' is no mere hypothesis; it results from the observation of
thousands of minds, throughout thousands of years. It has long seemed--I
trust it will seem still--the best explanation of the strange deeds of
that strange being, man: and where we find in history facts which seem to
contradict it, we shall not cast away rashly or angrily either it or
them: but if we be Bacon's true disciples, we shall use them patiently
and reverently to correct and expand our notions of the law itself, and
rise thereby to more deep and just conceptions of education, of man,
and--it may be--of God Himself.

In proportion as we look at history thus; searching for effective, rather
than final causes, and content to see God working everywhere, without
impertinently demanding of Him a reason for His deeds, we shall study in
a frame of mind equally removed from superstition on the one hand, and
necessitarianism on the other. We shall not be afraid to confess natural
agencies: but neither shall we be afraid to confess those supernatural
causes which underlie all existence, save God's alone.

We shall talk of more than of an over-ruling Providence. That such
exists, will seem to us a patent fact. But it will seem to us somewhat
Manichaean to believe that the world is ill made, mankind a failure, and
that all God has to do with