that is finite errs, therefore nature may " blunder," and " work out her ideas badly," 1 besides becoming weary and going into a temporary decline. The Hyle of
the ancients, in which the ideas, that is, " immaterial entities," were
placed, has done the best it could — for this would seem to be the
doctrine; but inherently limited and unpliant, it gave the ideas but an
incomplete expression, and was ever exhibiting its imperfectness or
gross nature ; and sometimes it manifested its low qualities in giving
out mushrooms, in spite of the ideas of the good and beautiful that
pertained to the eternal archetype, or emanated from the Infinite
source of all good.
But
if nature be an expression of the purpose of God, can we, with truth,
speak of her blunders ? His laws were sent forth ; and whatever appears
abnormal or normal in nature was involved in those laws ; and shall we
say, if that plan admitted of deserts over the land, excrescences on
the oak, lice and fleas and intestinal worms about living beings, and
monstrous births, that nature does her work badly ? Disease and death
are part of the same system of evils; are they also blunders ? Are
they chargeable to nature acting out, in any true sense, her own
unfortunate propensities, or to God as expressing his will in nature ;
that is, in the system which He established ? We can offer, here, but a
few brief remarks in reply to these great questions.
The
institution of death is universal for all life on the earth. It is in
the history of every plant and of every animal ; and is, therefore, in
the very foundation-laws of nature. Moreover, since death is directly
connected with growth, and, in a sense, grows out of it, the laws of
life are, therefore, bound up with laws of decay. A single mullet has
been found to contain thirteen millions of eggs, and a codfish eleven
millions. These facts give no extravagant view of prolific nature. They
exhibit a profusion of life to meet a profusion of death. Life is the
tw-fiowing stream ; death, the owt-flowing; the in-flow, in such a
world as ours, necessitating the out-flow, as much as in any current-
» World-Problem, p. 202. 43*
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