begets that activity of the moral life from which results the highest form of happiness.  When we attempt to estimate our mental and moral sufferings, it is impossible even to approximate the proportion of them that are due to our voluntary infringement of law; but, adding together all that spring from natural sources and all that men bring upon themselves, the suffering is still outweighed by the pleasure among the great mass of men.

But, however unfavorable a view we take of the condition of humanity, it is gross exaggeration to say, “There is no evidence whatever in Nature for Divine justice, whatever standard of justice our ethical opinions may lead us to recognize:  ... there is no shadow of justice in the general arrangements of Nature.”  Though many of Nature’s dealings with man appear to be unjust, by far the larger proportion of them are graduated according to what seems, even to us, a standard of strict equity.  As Matthew Arnold puts it, there is a power in Nature “which makes for righteousness.”  And every generation verifies the words of the Preacher:  “The righteous shall be recompensed in the earth—­much more the wicked and the sinner;” “as righteousness tendeth to life, so he that pursueth evil pursueth it to his own death.”  It was the reverent saying of that noblest of pagans, Marcus Aurelius, that “if a man should have a feeling and a deeper insight with respect to the things which are produced in the universe, there is hardly anything that comes in the course of Nature which will not seem to him to be in a manner disposed so as to give pleasure.”  When that “deeper insight” comes, and the eyes of man’s spiritual understanding are opened, all appearance of injustice in Nature will probably vanish.

If men were indeed as wretched as Mr. Mill describes them to be, and had no fear of judgment and immortality—­which Mr. Mill informs us are probably but figments of the brain—­why should they continue to endure “the calamity of so long life”?

  ’Twere best at once to sink to peace,
    Like birds the charming serpent draws—­
    To drop head-foremost in the jaws
  Of vacant darkness, and to cease.

So men would begin to reason if this dark gospel of despair were ever to gain currency; but, fortunately, it is only the morbid dream of a closet philosopher, who fancied the world was upside down because he could not unriddle it with his logical Rule of Three.

This representation of Nature is not only at variance with facts, but inconsistent with Mr. Mill’s own conclusions, as he reasons from natural phenomena that the Creator is both wise and beneficent, but that He is in some way hindered from fully accomplishing His kind purposes.  But if “there is no evidence whatever for Divine justice, and no shadow of justice in the general arrangements of Nature,” the reasonable inference is that its author is a being of infinite malignity who is in some mysterious manner, for the present, prevented from wreaking the full measure of his wrath upon mankind.  From this horrible thought Mr. Mill recoils, and, giving logic to the winds, he trusts that