LAWS OF NATURE AND THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLVI, Issue 13990, 20 February 1909, Page 5 (Supplement)

LAWS OF NATURE AND THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD.

Disasters such as that which lias taken place, 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 »...a as yet achieved few permanent results. The awfulness of an event that destroys, in a Hash 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 Providence 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 ho thinks, with a cruel God. to whom love, pity, mercy, and appreciation of virtue are unknown. The onlooker is not only territied, is not only helpless, but lie is in revolt against an order of things that sweeps away the just and the unjust and all the symbols of civilisation in an avalanche of horror, and creates in a smiling land a wilderness witnout any order. Can there be a Providence that watches over the affairs of men? lie asks. Can it be tine that there is a Father in heaven who notes even the fall of the sparrow, if such things as this can be'.' Was not the position of the primitive savage the true one? Are not the spiritual forces which surround us malignant at heart, forces that hate the ways of man and beast, despise their pleasures, rejoice in their pains, ami torture ttieni singly day by day or on occasions such as these by hecatombs? 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? There are many answers, as many, indeed, as there are minds that really devote themselves to this ultimate problem. Each man can solve for —must, indeed, ultimately solve for himself—the. riddle of the universe if he 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 a' Kempis. who, living at the end of the Middle Ages without any hope of that renaissance which was in fact so close at hand, looked in the heart of man and thence into heaven for his answer. Ho said, ill 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?' These things have happened since the birth of time. Their frequency, it ie 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." 80 far the mystic, and to a certain-type of mind hie 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 weepj ing of many voicesmen 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 phvsical 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 retribution undeserved so far as the state of the soul is concerned; but since I have no j doubt that the state of the soul suffers no j injury from the mere fact of physical dis- j aster, 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 schoolmaster. He learns to build better cities, to raise healthier races, to evolve a nobler type of humanity. From the moral point of view he acquires, like Jacob, in his wrestling with that angel of God whom we now call Nature, new powers, new senses, new hopes." The human insistence that the universe, to justify itself, must in the particularity of its acts achieve just results is a true one, but nevertheless when we revolt against Providence because of events that happen in the course of Nature, a duty lies upon us to see whether the terrible things that happen are or arc not due to human error and want of foresight and prudence, to the absence of national or individual capacity and care. In grappling with disease we recognise this. The plague has often claimed in a. few weeks as many victims as the Calabrian earthquake has now secured. To-day nations watch the marches of a disease as they watch the marches of an army, and slowly these fearful, but natural, scourges of humanity arc yielding to the armies of science and common-sense. All nations are one nation in fighting disease, and in striving to secure eoual terms in the conflict with Nature. There, too, the thinker is right. The moral standard of nations rises in the presence of the, as yet, unequal battle. National jealousies fire set aside, and all nations rise as one to heal any vast wound that Nature in her course may inflict on the slowly built and ever insecure fabric of civilisation. But the true answer to the man who questions the righteousness of Providence in the face of great calamities includes, surely, something of Hip mystic's as well as of 'the thinker's position. The sense of uncertainty that pervades our lives needs some balancing force. The whole struggle of civilisation is the struggle for liberty. When man emerged from the straggle with brute forces he found the first stage of liberty; then as society ordered itself man gradually secured first personal and then political freedom. But when he has obtained the utmost outward freedom he is still in chains unless he has the inner liberty the sense of immortality, of certainty that his life is but a stage in a process of growth, and that his personality is no uncertain evanescent force. If a man possesses the inward certainty of immortality as well as the knowledge*that the struggle with Nature is necessary for the upward movement of mankind, then he will regard with no hopeless eve disasters which must overwhelm the faith and dull the capacity of thof-e who believe Nature to be ultimately evil, and regard the Mind behind Nature as essentially unjust.London Spectator.

A strange experience befell Princess Wanda f Schonaich-Carolahith, whose hobby it- is to breed poultry at her model farm near Freistndt. One autumn evening the Princess heard a commotion going on in one of her fowl runs, and, going cut herself, she saw a man in the act of putting birds into a sack. The Princess shouted, and the man made off with the birds, dropping, in his flight, a pocketbook, which was afterwards found to contain the sum of two thousand marks. As eight chickens ' were stolen, this worked out at 300 marks (£ls) a pieta Poor thief-