Nature is not benevolent; Nature is just, gives pound for pound, measure for measure, makes no exceptions, never tempers her decrees with mercy, or winks at any infringement of her laws.  And in the end is not this best?  Could the universe be run as a charity or a benevolent institution, or as a poor-house of the most approved pattern?  Without this merciless justice, this irrefragable law, where should we have brought up long ago?  It is a hard gospel; but rocks are hard too, yet they form the foundations of the hills.

Man introduces benevolence, mercy, altruism, into the world, and he pays the price in his added burdens; and he reaps his reward in the vast social and civic organizations that were impossible without these things.

I have no doubt that the life of man upon this planet will end, as all other forms of life will end.  But the potential man will continue and does continue on other spheres.  One cannot think of one part of the universe as producing man, and no other part as capable of it.  The universe is all of a piece so far as its material constituents are concerned; that we know.  Can there be any doubt that it is all of a piece so far as its invisible and intangible forces and capabilities are concerned?  Can we believe that the earth is an alien and a stranger in the universe? that it has no near kin? that there is no tie of blood, so to speak, between it and the other planets and systems?  Are the planets not all of one family, sitting around the same central source of warmth and life?  And is not our system a member of a still larger family or tribe, and it of a still larger, all bound together by ties of consanguinity?  Size is nothing, space is nothing.  The worlds are only red corpuscles in the arteries of the infinite.  If man has not yet appeared on the other planets, he will in time appear, and when he has disappeared from this globe, he will still continue elsewhere.

I do not say that he is the end and aim of creation; it would be logical, I think, to expect a still higher form.  Man has been man but a little while comparatively, less than one hour of the twenty-four of the vast geologic day; a few hours more and he will be gone; less than another geologic day like the past, and no doubt all life from the earth will be gone.  What then?  The game will be played over and over again in other worlds, without approaching any nearer the final end than we are now.  There is no final end, as there was no absolute beginning, and can be none with the infinite.

THE END