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been pronounced and recorded in the secret councils of the skies. We are neither confronted with the witness nor allowed a day in court. From the hour of birth we are beset by invulnerable and invisible enemies, the pestilence that walketh in darkness and the destruction that wasteth at noonday. Fatal germs, immortal bacilli, heavensent microbes, inhabit the air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink, poisoning where they fly and infecting where they repose.

Science continually discloses malevolent agencies, hitherto undetected, which we vainly try to extirpate, or to build frail and feeble barriers against their depredations.

Theology complacently announces that for the majority of the human race this tough world is the prelude to an eternity in hell.

Nature, like a witness in contempt, stands mute. Science returns from the remotest excursions, shakes its head, and, smiling, puts the question by. Christ contented Himself with a few vague and unsatisfactory generalities.

The evidence of a superintending moral purpose and design in the affairs of men are faint and few. The wicked prosper, the good suffer. The problems of sin, pain, and evil are insoluble. Visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation, making the innocent suffer for the offences of the guilty, is

an unjust and cruel law that ought to be repealed. Civilization has long since rejected the principle from human jurisprudence. Even treason, the highest crime known to its code, no longer works corruption of blood or forfeiture of estate.

Unless man is immortal, the moral universe, so far as he is concerned, disappears altogether. If he does not survive the grave, it makes no difference to him whether there be God or devil, or heaven or hell. And it must be not only a survival, but a continuity of consciousness as well, if the evil are to be punished and the good rewarded hereafter.

Ingalls believed mankind was making progress in the science of religion — in the science of godmaking. He knew what every priest is anxious that his parishioner shall never know- that the term "religion" is of universal application, and that it embraces the crude incantations and deceptions of the Medicine Man as well as the tenets of Christianity. Savage practices no more condemn the one than do refined cruelties and polished amenities establish the other:

There was a profound truth in the declaration of Voltaire, that if there was no God, it would be necessary for man to invent one. God is indispensable [to man]. As the race

advances, it

clothes God with higher attributes and dignifies Him with more lofty functions. The gloomy and inexorable God of the Puritans has disappeared. He has been succeeded by a Supreme Being of infinite mercy, tenderness, and goodness; a ruler, a law-maker, subject to limitations and restraints imposed by His own perfections.

Opposition to Christianity, or any other religion, is no indication of infidelity, he argued, "but rather the strongest evidence of the religious spirit of the times, the hunger and thirst for knowledge about what can never be known".

So impenetrable did he regard the veil which hides the future that he expected another Christ and new revelations. But even these will prove insufficient and unsatisfactory, as have all others, for in this field alone has no progress been made, as witness his belief declared in his estimate of the book of Job:

The book of Job is the oldest, and in my judgment, the highest production of the human intellect. It is especially interesting because it shows that humanity at the dawn of history was engaged in considering the same problems that perplex us now immortality, the existence of evil,

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the afflictions and misfortunes of the good in this world, and the prosperity of the wicked. We have made no progress in solving these problems. The barriers are insurmountable. The centuries are silent. The soul struggles, aspires, beats its wings against the bars, flutters, and disappears.

All this is grounded in human experience nay, more than that, in the inherent qualities of the nature of man. And, Ingalls believed rightly that sin, wickedness, wretchedness are necessary to our progress - indispensable to our very existence:

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Poverty will never be abolished, nor misery, nor pain, nor disease. They are inseparable from humanity. Were all men contented and secure, progress would cease and the race would expire.

This, in a more delicate and cautious way, is the ruthless trampling under foot of temporary systems and agreed conventionalities so extensively practiced by Carlyle. Completed and stationary institutions for man's redemption Ingalls regarded with that independence and that reckless scorn peculiar to his Scandinavian-Germanic ancestry.

IV.

The contemplation of the mystery of this life did not react upon Ingalls to produce melancholy or misanthropy. In a letter to his wife, he said, "Life to me is so vivid and intense, like an eager flame, that pain, disease, weakness, annihilation seem monstrous and intolerable."

He loved life. Its enjoyment was precious to him, some expression of which we find in his writings. As early as 1872, in a letter to his father on a Thanksgiving anniversary, he said:

I have thought much to-day of the long career of my life, which has been extended so long beyond my early anticipations, and rendered conspicuous by so many blessings which I am conscious I have not deserved and which I never hoped to enjoy. Standing upon the uplands of middle life, my childhood and youth seem like the experiences of another planet, and though I have suffered much from the tortures of disturbed functions, diseased nerves, sensibilities unnaturally acute, the war in my members between the spirit and the flesh, the agonies of conflict between unconquerable appetites, passions, impulses and ambitions, and a conscience too sensitive to submit to moral anodynes, yet I have much to

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