ve Force. The Creator who inspired man with
love--love for his fellow beings and love of the beautiful--could not be
the same Creator who framed that irredeemably cruel principle observable
throughout nature, _i.e._, the survival of the fittest; the preying of
the stronger on the weaker--of the tiger on the feebler beasts of the
jungle; the eagle on the smaller birds of the air; the wolf on the
sheep; the shark on the poor, defenceless fish, and so on; neither could
He be the Creator that deals in diseases--foul and filthy diseases,
common, not only to all divisions of the human species, but to
quadrupeds, birds, fish, and even flora; that brings into existence
cripples and idiots, the blind, the deaf and dumb; and watches with
passive inertness the most acute sufferings, not only of adults, but of
sinless children and all manner of helpless animals. No! It is
impossible to conceive that such incompatibilities can be the work of
one Creator. But, supposing, for the sake of argument, we may admit the
possibility of only one Creator, we cannot concede that this Creator is
at the same time both omnipotent and merciful. My own belief, which is
merely based on common sense and observation, is that this earth was
created by many Forces--that everything that makes for man's welfare is
due to Benevolent Forces; and that everything that tends to his
detriment is due to antagonistic Malevolent Forces; and that the
Malevolent Forces exist for the very simple reason that the Benevolent
Forces are not sufficiently powerful to destroy them.

These Malevolent Forces, then--the originators of all evil--created
werwolves; and the property of lycanthropy becoming in many cases
hereditary, there were families that could look back upon countless
generations possessed of it. But lycanthropy did not remain in the
exclusive possession of a few families; the bestowal of it continued
long after its original creation, and I doubt if this bestowal has, even
now, become entirely a thing of the past. There are still a few
regions--desolate and isolated regions in Europe (in Russia,
Scandinavia, and even France), to say nothing of Asia, Africa and
America, Australasia and Polynesia--which are unquestionably the haunts
of Vagrarians, Barrowvians, and other kinds of undesirable Elementals,
and it is quite possible that, through the agency of these spirits, the
property of lycanthropy might be acquired by those who have learned in
solitude how to commu