July 18

For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of Him who hath subjected the same in hope.

IT is held by many students of Nature that her laws affirm a Pessimism and not an Optimism. "Red in tooth and claw with ravin," she shrieks against the creed that her Maker is a God of love. The only morality which she inculcates is that of a tiger in the jungle, or at best that of a wolf-pack. . . . The answer to this is that Nature includes man as well as the brutes, and the merciful and moral man as well as the savage. Physical science, at any rate, can exclude nothing from the domain of Nature. And the Christian may say with all reverence that Nature includes, or rather is included by, Christ, the Word of God, by whom it was made. And the Word was made flesh to teach us that vicarious suffering, which we see to be the law of Nature, is a law of God, a thing not foreign to His own life, and therefore for all alike a condition of perfection, not a reductio ad absurdum of existence. The reductio ad absurdum is not of Nature, but of selfish individualism, which suffers shipwreck alike in objective and in subjective religion. It is precisely because the shadow of the Cross lies across the world that we can watch Nature at work with "admiration, hope, and love," instead of with horror and disgust

WILLIAM RALPH INGE

SUBJECTED IN HOPE