s
question, none are so unfortunate as the happy, and we should envy only
the suffering and distressed. If evil is necessary to the development
of man, in this life, how is it possible for the soul to improve in the
perfect joy of paradise?

Since Paley found his watch, the argument of "design" has been relied
upon as unanswerable. The Church teaches that this world, and all that
it contains, were created substantially as we now see them, that the
grasses, the flowers, the trees, and all animals, including man, were
special creations, and that they sustain no necessary relation to each
other. The most orthodox will admit that some earth has been washed
into the sea, that the sea has encroached a little upon the land, and
that some mountains may be a trifle lower than in the morning of
creation. The theory of gradual development was unknown to our
fathers; the idea of evolution did not occur to them. Our fathers
looked upon the then arrangement of things as the primal arrangement.
The earth appeared to them fresh from the hands of a deity. They knew
nothing of the slow evolutions of countless years, but supposed that
the almost infinite variety of vegetable and animal forms had existed
from the first.

Suppose that upon some island we should find a man a million years of
age, and suppose that we should find him in the possession of a most
beautiful carriage, constructed upon the most perfect model. And
suppose further, that he should tell us that it was the result of
several hundred thousand years of labor and of thought; that for fifty
thousand years he used as flat a log as he could find, before it
occurred to him that by splitting the log he could have the same
surface with only half the weight; that it took him many thousand years
to invent wheels for this log; that the wheels he first used were
solid, and that fifty thousand years of thought suggested the use of
spokes and tire; that for many centuries he used the wheels without
linch-pins: that it took a hundred thousand years more to think of
using four wheels, instead of two; that for ages he walked behind the
carriage, when going down hill, in order to hold it back, and that only
by a lucky chance he invented the tongue; would we conclude that this
man, from the very first, had been an infinitely ingenious and perfect
mechanic? Suppose we found him living in an elegant mansion, and he
should inform us that he lived in that house for five hundred thousan