say, "in plain language, they are a pair of old gamblers."

Yes, if it pleases you to call honest men by a bad name. But they
risk nothing that is not their own; and if they lose, they are not
impoverished. They desire nothing that belongs to other men; and if
they win, no one is robbed. If all gambling were like that, it
would be difficult to see the harm in it. Indeed, a daring moralist
might even assert, and prove by argument, that so innocent a delight
in the taking of chances is an aid to virtue.

Do you remember Martin Luther's reasoning on the subject of
"excellent large pike"? He maintains that God would never have
created them so good to the taste, if He had not meant them to be
eaten. And for the same reason I conclude that this world would
never have been left so full of uncertainties, nor human nature
framed so as to find a peculiar joy and exhilaration in meeting them
bravely and cheerfully, if it had not been divinely intended that
most of our amusement and much of our education should come from
this source.

"Chance" is a disreputable word, I know. It is supposed by many
pious persons to be improper and almost blasphemous to use it. But
I am not one of those who share this verbal prejudice. I am
inclined rather to believe that it is a good word to which a bad
reputation has been given. I feel grateful to that admirable
"psychologist who writes like a novelist," Mr. William James, for
his brilliant defence of it. For what does it mean, after all, but
that some things happen in a certain way which might have happened
in another way? Where is the immorality, the irreverence, the
atheism in such a supposition? Certainly God must be competent to