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1. To those who believe in free will, the difficulties attaching to the problem of human suffering are not formidable. If we take away all the wretchedness that springs from depraved hearts, it is a very small minimum indeed that is left behind. And then assuming immortality, there are surpassing compensations. But these principles are scarcely applicable to the lower creation. Much of the earth is desert, and the most fertile lands produce what is noxious more freely than what is good. And then animate nature is a pandemonium of internecine war and hunger and pain. And the explanations that help us somewhat in the enigma of human suffering scarcely serve us here.

2. But the Bible anticipates this difficulty, and foreshadows a conclusive answer in the text. Nature is linked with man. Its imperfections are explained by his. It falls and rises again with the fall and rise of man. Just as the law gives to the parent the custody of his own child, so God gives to man power over the world to modify it for good or evil at his will. Man stands in relation to the inferior creation as the Divine Mediator does to all mankind, and by the revelation of the glory of God's sons the whole creation will be lifted at last to higher beneficence and more perfect majesty. J. S. Mill said that "the facts of the universe suggested to his mind, not so much the idea of a beneficent and all-wise Creator, as that of a demiurge dealing with an intractable material, over which he had not acquired complete mastery." The true demiurge is man. God has given him an all but unlimited stewardship over nature, and we should not go to her anarchic realms to find out what God is, but rather to find out what man is. The kingdom suffers through the misconduct of an ill-regulated king. A slave may be virtuous and kindly in character, but if his master be evil, he will have to be the instrument of many an unholy behest. However benign the qualities latent in nature, it will necessarily exhibit at times the sinister character of the lord it is compelled to obey.

3. The savage believes that every part of the creation is animate; and the truth in fetichism is that the spirit of man reflects itself in nature. His identical soul does not pass into its but the shadow of what he is always rests upon it. It seems to echo the groans of his more conscious pain. It is feeling towards deliverance from the bondage into which he has brought it.

4. If we do not get our full share of nature's gifts, we are apt to charge upon it, and its Divine Author, things that in no proper sense belong to them. The street Arab wilt not think very gratefully of the kindliness of nature, even if he should be taken for a day into the country, and see the ripe cornfield, or fruit orchard, or vinery. Nature's hand may be lavish, and her heart large; but the famishing millions of Asia will not be very profoundly impressed by her kindliness, although they may hear that in Western America wheat is so abundant and so cheap that the farmers have had to burn it for fuel. To these poor wretches Nature will be tormentor rather than friend. Some time ago a political speaker gave utterance to an aphorism that would form an admirable comment upon the text, "The laws of nature," said he, "preside over the creation of wealth, but the heart of man over its distribution, in sympathy, justice, brotherhood." That defines the whole question. Nature, after all, is only truly beneficent to the subjects of her kingdom when she is helped by the intelligence, the justice, and the kindliness of man.

I. GOD DISTRIBUTES THE BREAD HE IS EVER MULTIPLYING BY NATURAL PROCESSES, AFTER THE PATTERN OF THE SYMBOLIC MIRACLE IN GALILEE. He commits it into the hands of servants, who are to be the channels of His bounty. Suppose for a moment that the sordid elements hidden in some of the disciples had come to the surface in connection with that miracle. Judas slips into his capacious bag the food he should have distributed to a hungry woman and her babes. Thomas, dreading the privations that may come, keeps back that which should have been given to decrepit old men. If we could listen to the speech of weary men and fainting women as they creep to their homes, we might possibly hear some reflections upon the character of the Wonder-worker which would be very wide of the mark. Whatever failure there is in nature arises not from any lack of generosity in the Power that multiplies the bread, but from the selfish, partial, short-sighted distribution of the disciples. Nature provides for the needs of all, but man robs her of her rightful reputation to beneficence. He projects upon her kind and radiant visage the shadow of his own tyranny and greed. Nature waits for the coming of a higher life. She can only find that life through the regeneration of man.

II. NATURE HAS FERTILE FIELDS READY FOR HER SONS THAT THE FOOT OF MAN RARELY TREADS. Every pauper in our unions might be a lord of wide acres without confiscating any one's property. Thousands of artisans prefer starvation wages to the life of the health-giving prairie. In the swarming lands of the East millions cling to the soil on which they were born, and risk death by famine every decade, rather than move to unoccupied lands that can be reached without crossing the sea. How is it that the beneficence of nature throughout these vast virgin territories is wasted? She shares man's bondage. She cries out: "Emigrate your destitute. I am ready to clothe, feed, and shelter them." Nature's challenge is not accepted, and why? We insist upon dealing with chronic pauperism by pittances and palliatives. And the selfish capitalist cries out too: "We can have no emigration schemes. The labour market will be depleted. When prosperity returns we shall not be able to get sufficient hands." And starving people themselves are reluctant to cut the tie that holds them to fatherland. The man pressed to emigrate thinks he might be taken in by the land-jobbers, or fail to find in his new neighbours the helpfulness he can always find in his own kith and kin. He will stand at bay in the presence of famine rather than run that risk. Nature has spread a table for the needs of every man. But in the craft, selfishness, and vices of man, a file of demon-terrors have been planted about the table, that effectually ward off the famished crowds. Nature cannot rise above the moral level of those to whom she is placed in subjection. In his fall and in his rise alike man carries with him the creation of which he is the head.

III. "The laws of nature preside over the creation of wealth," but "THE HEART OF MAN" ITSELF OFTEN PRESIDES OVER THE LAWS OF NATURE. Sceptics point to the fact that a great proportion of the earth is occupied by desert, and they suppose that they have disproved the idea of benevolent design. But may not the very desert be Nature's benign call to labour? Some of the most fruitful soils were once bog and rock and sand, and have become what they now are by human labour. The time wasted in a generation by the idle and dissolute would be sufficient to turn the Sahara into a fruitful field. There are very few deserts that could not be fertilised if the capital were forthcoming, and the difficulty nowadays is never to find capital, but to find men honest enough to direct and control it. The old prophecies about the blossoming deserts are meant to teach the lesson that the life of regenerate man will connect itself with the regeneration of nature.

IV. WHEN WE JUDGE GOD BY HIS WORK IN NATURE, WE MUST LOOK AT THE IDEAL CAPABILITY HIDDEN IN IT, RATHER THAN AT THE ATTAINMENT. "The heart of man," no less than "the laws of nature," presides over the creation of all kinds of wealth. God created the life beneath us, with "a seed in itself," "put man into the garden, to dress it and keep it." These inspired traditions contain the important truth which will solve not a few of our difficulties, that God never meant nature to be looked at apart from its relation to man. Do not look to the berry of the hedgerow, or the dwarf flower of the bleak hill-top, for the gauge of God's beneficent work. Look at what fruit and flower may become under the most skilful culture. Judge God's work in man by all that man may be trained to, and judge God's work in nature by the potential excellence that sleeps in its mysterious depths. If some exquisite porcelain painting had been spoiled in the after-firing, you would not judge the artist by the blunder of a drunken furnace-man. Do not judge God's work by the blurred lines you see in nature to-day. It has been put in subjection to man, and can only be all that for which God has fitted it with the redemption of man.

V. ALMOST ALL THE FORCES OF NATURE WAIT TO RECEIVE THE MORAL IMPRESS THEY ARE TO REAR FROM THE CHARACTER OF MAN. If he is of the temper of Cain, or driven by the evil of others to the defence of life or home, he takes the iron furnished to him by the hills, and puts on it the broad-arrow mark of murder, welding it into death-dealing scimitar or assegai, mortar or mitrailleuse. In the hands of renovated man the metal shall lend itself to peaceful industry and navigation and travel. Unrenewed man takes the chemical forces of nature and manipulates them into charges which shall create a chaos of carnage and flame. These forces in the hands of man renewed in the image of God's gentleness shall be used only to tunnel the separating mountains and make canals and highways to bring near to each other the different fragments of the human family. Nature sometimes seems malignant in not only producing thorns and thistles, but plants infinitely more dangerous. But the very poison plants borrow their terror either from our ignorance or from the character with which the secret murderer has clothed them; and with the renewal of the human race in knowledge and humanity they shall be known only as healing herbs. If Nature sometimes seems cruel, it is because man has made her so. Nature can only be "very good," as at first, with man's full redemption.

VI. Man's sovereignty over animate nature is not so obvious as his power over inanimate nature, And yet there is proof that THE DIFFERENT CIRCLES OF LIFE IN SEA AND FOREST AND AIR RISE AND FALL IN HIS RISE AND FALL. We may set aside the poetic but not Mosaic idea that just as soon as Adam sinned snakes suddenly developed poison bags, and wolves suddenly discovered a taste for blood, etc. And yet there is an inverted truth in the grotesque conception. It can be proved that the animal world has been inoculated with the virulence of man's worst passions. The temper of a dog or a horse is influenced by the temper of its master, and the dispositions of all domesticated animals may be modified by selective processes. Some of the most powerful denizens of the forest will never attack unless first attacked. Is not the domestication of animals a problem to which Paul had better clues than the modern naturalist? Is this the fragment of a lost empire, or the first conquest of a new empire that shall one day be completely won and harmonised by man's kindness and skill? "They shall not hurt nor destroy in all slay My holy mountain." John teaches that as well as Paul. The four living creatures placed round about the throne are the symbols of the powers of nature. Conclusion: You are perhaps ready to say, "It will be little compensation to the dumb creatures that have suffered, even if their far-off descendants should be brought at last into a kindlier world by the regeneration of man." Now I am not going to extenuate the cruelties practised upon dumb creatures. Our descendants will be almost as much ashamed of some of our cruelties as we are ashamed of the cannibalism of our ancestors. But are the sufferings of the brute creatures as great as we think? Imagination adds nine-tenths of the terror with which human suffering is invested. Unimaginative races suffer comparatively little under appalling mutilations. Brute creatures possess imagination in a very inferior degree, if they possess it at all. That may be accounted as an anodyne to soothe their pain. But is there to be no compensation? Some have held a resurrection of animals. There are perhaps only two objections to that view. Our interest in the animal world is so slight that it scarcely seems worth while. And in animal life we detect no forecast of immortality. Possibly in some of the lower spheres of life the doctrine of the transmigration of souls may be truer than we think. Some modern naturalists hold, and with a fair show of reason, that whilst human consciousness centres in the individual, animal consciousness tends to centre itself in the species. If that be the case, the suffering individual may be compensated in the improved and perfected life of the species. We may leave the "how" to the unseen Hand that will not fail to redress the disturbed balance in the minutest life. The whole creation falls in man, and is to rise again in his moral uplifting. That is the great lesson for us.

(T. G. Selby.)

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KJV: For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God.

WEB: For the creation waits with eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed.