disinterested and sincere. It is the presence of this one truly good
man that warrants our asking, in all its simplicity, the terrible
question that rises to our lips. Had he not been there we might have
tried to believe that this act of seemingly monstrous injustice was
in reality composed of particles of sovereign justice. We might have
whispered to ourselves that what they termed charity, out yonder,
was perhaps only the arrogant flower of permanent injustice.

We seem unwilling to recognise the blindness of the external forces,
such as air, fire, water, the laws of gravity and others, with which
we must deal and do battle. The need is heavy upon us to find
excuses for fate; and even when blaming her, we seem to be
endeavouring still to explain the causes of her past and her future
action, conscious the while of a feeling of pained surprise, as
though a man we valued highly had done some dreadful deed. We love
to idealise destiny, and are wont to credit her with a sense of
justice loftier far than our own; and however great the injustice
whereof she may have been guilty, our confidence will soon flow back
to her, the first feeling of dismay over; for in our heart we plead
that she must have reasons we cannot fathom, that there must be laws
we cannot divine. The gloom of the world would crush us were we to
dissociate morality from fate. To doubt the existence of this high,
protecting justice and virtue, would seem to us to be denying the
existence of all justice and of all virtue.

We are no longer able to accept the narrow morality of positive
religion, which entices with reward and threatens with punishment;
and yet we are apt to forget that, were fate possessed of the most
rudimentary sense of justice, our conception of a lofty,
disinterested morality would fade into thin air. What merit in being