and injuries, and his precepts are practical.  He teaches us to bear what we cannot avoid, and his lessons may be just as useful to him who denies the being and the government of God as to him who believes in both.  There is no direct answer in Antoninus to the objections which may be made to the existence and providence of God because of the moral disorder and suffering which are in the world, except this answer which he makes in reply to the supposition that even the best men may be extinguished by death.  He says if it is so, we may be sure that if it ought to have been otherwise, the gods would have ordered it otherwise (xii. 5).  His conviction of the wisdom which we may observe in the government of the world is too strong to be disturbed by any apparent irregularities in the order of things.  That these disorders exist is a fact, and those who would conclude from them against the being and government of God conclude too hastily.  We all admit that there is an order in the material world, a Nature, in the sense in which that word has been explained, a constitution ([Greek:  kataskeue]), what we call a system, a relation of parts to one another and a fitness of the whole for something.  So in the constitution of plants and of animals there is an order, a fitness for some end.  Sometimes the order, as we conceive it, is interrupted, and the end, as we conceive it, is not attained.  The seed, the plant, or the animal sometimes perishes before it has passed through all its changes and done all its uses.  It is according to Nature, that is a fixed order, for some to perish early and for others to do all their uses and leave successors to take their place.  So man has a corporeal and intellectual and moral constitution fit for certain uses, and on the whole man performs these uses, dies, and leaves other men in his place.  So society exists, and a social state is manifestly the natural state of man—­the state for which his nature fits him, and society amidst innumerable irregularities and disorders still subsists; and perhaps we may say that the history of the past and our present knowledge give us a reasonable hope that its disorders will diminish, and that order, its governing principle, may be more firmly established.  As order then, a fixed order, we may say, subject to deviations real or apparent, must be admitted to exist in the whole nature of things, that which we call disorder or evil, as it seems to us, does not in any way alter the fact of the general constitution of things having a nature or fixed order.  Nobody will conclude from the existence of disorder that order is not the rule, for the existence of order both physical and moral is proved by daily experience and all past experience.  We cannot conceive how the order of the universe is maintained:  we cannot even conceive how our own life from day to day is continued, nor how we perform the simplest movements of the body, nor how we grow and think and act, though we know many of the conditions