THE LAWS OF NATURE AND THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD.
DISASTERS such as that which has taken place this week in Calabria and Sicily have probably affected the minds of all ages with the same sense of terror, helplessness, and revolt as is apparent in some of the descriptions of the earthquake in South Italy. Any event malignant in form, sudden in operation, and vast in area of effect dulls the reasoning faculty, stuns the sense of faith, and throws man back for a moment to the intellectual stage of prehistoric Periods when the long struggle with Nature had as yet achieved few permanent results. The awfulness of an event that destroys, in a flash as it were, the careful husbandry of ages as well as unnumbered thousands of happy human lives transcends the amplitude of human grief and obscures the Providence of God.. Grief has its homely limitations, and measures Provi- dence with the terms of common experience. When something happens that bestows loss and agony with equal hand upon an entire population, the nerves of sorrow seem severed, and man is .face to face, for the hour, not with the horrors of Nature, but, as lie thinks, with a cruel God, to whom love, pity, mercy, and appreciation of virtue are unknown. The onlooker is not only terrified, is not only helpless, hut be is in revolt against an order of things that sweeps away the just and the miJust and all the symbols of civilisation in an avalanche of horror, and. creates in a smiling land a wilderness without any order., Can there be a Providence that watches over the 'lairs of men P be asks. Can it be true that there is a Father Inb: heaven who notes even the fall of the sparrow, if such 41118 as this can be ? Was not the position of the primitive rurage the true one? Are not the spiritual forces which mrIpund us malignant at heart, forces that bate the ways of anand and beast, despise their pleasures, rejoice in their pains, the torture them singly day by day or on occasions such as -if hecatombs P God cannot be good to torture us like this; or if He be good, He, like ourselves, is powerless to check the essential sorrows of an evil universe.
What is the answer to this question, which, though brought into prominence by sudden and vast catastrophes, is adopted day in, day out by solitary sufferers whose griefs are such that they transcend the individual's capacity for sorrow, faith, and acquiescence P There are many answers, as many, indeed, as there are minds that really devote themselves to this ultimate problem. Each man can solve for himself—must, indeed, ultimately solve for himself—the riddle of the universe if be is to have any substantial sense of reality in life. But all these answers practically fall into two or three classes. There is the answer of Thomas Kemple, who, living at the end of the Middle Ages without any hope of that Renaissance which was in fact so close at band, looked in the heart of man and thence into heaven for his answer. He said, in effect :—" This world is a place of vain griefs, a place, it is true, for work, for altruistic, effort, for all the Christlike virtues; but your main business here is to cultivate in your heart the inner liberty, that perfect freedom from physical and earthly restraints which, if acquired now, will give you an outfit for that heaven which I see with my spiritual eye founded and indestructible beyond the stars." That is the mystic outlook. It sweeps away with a serene gesture the changes and chances of this mortal life. " What matters one catastrophe more or less P These things have happened since the birth of time. Their frequency, it is true, diminishes, but their terror therefore increases; yet heed them not. They are part of the order of things. They hasten, or seem to hasten, death for some of the sons of men. But death is certain in any event. Here we have no abiding city. These sorrows, these joys, are as transient as life. Heed them not. Be free inwardly, and so be fit, whether death comes soon or late, to take up that permanent citizenship which awaits you in heaven if you will but be inwardly free and entirely patient." So far the mystic, and to a certain type of mind his answer is a real answer ; but it is not the answer that can satisfy the dwellers in a workaday world heartbroken by the sound of the weeping of many voices,—men and women weeping for their loved ones because they are not.
Another answer is that of the thinker who has read the results of science and philosophy into his scheme of the universe. He says :—" These catastrophes in no way blur the fact that the universe is indeed absolutely orderly. If men will stand in the way of the operations of Nature, they court physical destruction. Providence would not be Providence if it suspended the orderliness of the universe in order to save one or a million individuals pain of body or agony of mind. It is true enough that the interference with, or the neglect of, the course of Nature may be perfectly innocent, and the retribu- tion undeserved so far as the state of the soul is concerned; but since I have no doubt that the state of the soul suffers no injury from the mere fact of physical disaster, but may, in fact, find in that very disaster the means and opportunity of salvation, I do not grieve over the sufferings of innocence as one without hope. From the merely physical point of view, moreover, these awful events are not all loss. Man learns in the terrible school of Nature to be the master of his school- master. He learns to build better cities, to raise healthier races; to evolve a nobler type of humanity. From the moral point of view be acquires, like Jacob, in his wrestling with that angel of God whom we now call Nature, new powers, new souses, new hopes."
The thinker's answer probably moves us more than the mystie's answer. The sense of heroism that grows as the human race grows has surely been literally won from the struggle with Nature, and one knows full well that the awful events this week in Sicily have given rise to acts of heroism which transcend in their immortal vigour the most fearful cataclysms of Nature. Heroism in the teeth of Nature's terrors is a characteristic of the human race that seems in itself to indicate the immortality of the human personality. It is restricted to no nation, clime, or age. When a little Sussex girl or nine years last spring, a little child in charge of several younger children wandering in the marshes, leapt into a deep dyke to save one who had fallen in, seized the little child and with a supreme effort lifted it into safety and herself fell back in exhaustion to die, it is not possible to conceive that the act ended there: Her deed was one that in no just universe could be rewarded with the extinction of the
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