h to one man may be error to
another. We may adopt a course of action because it seems the more
expedient. Debatable questions have two sides to them. In the moral
realm that is true which is agreeable to the largest number of
competent judges. A mind that could see further and deeper might
reverse all our verdicts. To be right on any question in the moral
realm is to be in accord with that which makes for the greatest good
to the greatest number. In our Civil War the South believed itself
right in seceding from the Union; the North, in fighting to preserve
the Union. Both sections now see that the North had the larger right.
The South was sectional, the North national. Each of the great
political parties thinks it has a monopoly of the truth, but the truth
usually lies midway between them. Questions of right and wrong do not
necessarily mean questions of true and false. "There is nothing either
good or bad," says Hamlet, "but thinking makes it so." This may be
good Christian Science doctrine, but it is doubtful philosophy.

* * * * *

Yesterday, as I stood on the hill above Slabsides and looked over the
landscape dotted with farms just greening in the April sun, the
thought struck me afresh that all this soil, all the fertile fields,
all these leagues on leagues of sloping valleys and rolling hills came
from the decay of the rocks, and that the chief agent in bringing
about this decay and degradation was the gentle rain from heaven--that
without the rain through the past geologic ages, the scene I looked
upon would have been only one wild welter of broken or crumpled rocky
strata, not a green thing, not a living thing, should I have seen.

In the Hawaiian Islands one may have proof of this before his eyes. On
one end of the island of Maui, the rainfall is very great, and its
deep valleys and high sharp ridges are clothed with tropical verdure,
while on the other end, barely ten miles away, rain never falls, and
the barren, rocky desolation which the scene presents I can never
forget. No rain, no soil; no soil, no life.

We are, therefore, children of the rocks; the rocks are our mother,
and the rains our father.

* * * * *

When the stream of life, through some favoring condition, breaks
through its natural checks and bounds, and inundates and destroys
whole provinces of other forms, as when the locusts, the
forest-worms, the boll-weevil, the currant-