n't think how
it is that people don't resent more than they do the mere insult to
their self-respect involved in such a situation. Nothing can cure it,
nothing can improve it. It's a fundamental condition of life.

"If that were all it would be bad enough. But that's only the
beginning. For the world into which we are thus ignominiously flung
turns out to be incalculable and irrational. There are, of course, I
know, what are called the laws of nature. But I--to tell the honest
truth--I don't believe in them. I mean, I see no reason to suppose
that the sun will rise to-morrow, or that the seasons will continue to
observe their course, or that any of our most certain expectations will
be fulfilled in the future as they have been in the past. We import
into the universe our own prejudice in favour of order; and the
universe, I admit, up to a point appears to conform to it. But I don't
trust the conformity. Too many evidences abound of frivolous and
incalculable caprice. Why should not the appearance of order be but
one caprice the more, or even a crowning device of calculated malice?
And anyhow, the things that most concern us, tempests, epidemics,
accidents, from the catastrophe of birth to the deliverance of death,
we have no power to foresee or to forestall. Yet, in face of all this,
borne home to us every hour of every day, we cling to the creed of
universal law; and on the flux of chaos write our 'credo quia
impossibile.'

"Well, that is a heresy of mine I have never found anyone to share.
But no matter. My case is so strong I can afford to give it away point
by point. Granting then, that there were order in the universe, how
does that make it any better? Does it not rather make it worse, if the
order is such as to produce evil? And how great that evil is I need
not insist. For it has been presupposed in everything that has been
said to-night. If it were a satisfactory world you wouldn't all be
wanting to alter it. Still, you may say--people always do--'if there
is evil there is also good.' But it is just the things people call
good, even more than those they admit to be evil, that make me despair
of the world. How anyone with self-respect can accept, and accept
thankfully, the sort of things people do accept is to me a standing
mystery. It is surely the greatest triumph achieved by the Power that
made the universe that every week there gather into the churches
congregations of victims to recit