.. in the
other ... he will, in due time, be crushed and destroyed.... Our relation
to the universe can be ascertained only by experiment. We all have to
live out our lives.... One man is a Cromwell, another a Frederick, a
third a Goethe, a fourth a Louis XV. God hates Louis XV. and loves
Cromwell. Why, if so, He made Louis XV., and indeed whether He made him
or not, are idle questions which cannot be answered and should not be
asked. There are good men and bad men, all pass alike through this
mysterious hall of doom called life: most show themselves in their true
colours under pressure. The good are blessed here and hereafter; the bad
are accursed. Let us bring out as far as may be possible such good as a
man has had in him since his origin. Let us strike down the bad to the
hell that gapes for him. This, we think, or something like this, was Mr.
Carlyle's translation of election and predestination into politics and
morals.... There is not much pity and no salvation worth speaking of in
either body of doctrine; but there is a strange, and what some might
regard as a terrible parallelism between these doctrines and the
inferences that may be drawn from physical science. The survival of
the fittest has much in common with the doctrine of election, and
philosophical necessity, as summed up in what we now call evolution,
comes practically to much the same result as predestination.
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