Wallace’s theory of the survival of the fittest was suggested by the prodigal destructiveness of nature. Tennyson: “Finding that of fifty seeds She often brings but one to bear.” William James: “Our dogs are _in_ our human life, but not _of_ it. The dog, under the knife of vivisection, cannot understand the purpose of his suffering. For him it is only pain. So we may lie soaking in a spiritual atmosphere, a dimension of Being which we have at present no organ for apprehending. If we knew the purpose of our life, all that is heroic in us would religiously acquiesce.” Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 72—“Love is prepared to take deeper and sterner measures than benevolence, which is by itself a shallow thing.” The Lakes of Killarny in Ireland show what a paradise this world might be if war had not desolated it, and if man had properly cared for it. Our moral sense cannot justify the evil in creation except upon the hypothesis that this has some cause and reason in the misconduct of man.
This is not a perfect world. It was not perfect even when originally constituted. Its imperfection is due to sin. God made it with reference to the Fall,—the stage was arranged for the great drama of sin and redemption which was to be enacted thereon. We accept Bushnell’s idea of “anticipative consequences,” and would illustrate it by the building of a hospital-room while yet no member of the family is sick, and by the salvation of the patriarchs through a Christ yet to come. If the earliest vertebrates of geological history were types of man and preparations for his coming, then pain and death among those same vertebrates may equally have been a type of man’s sin and its results of misery. If sin had not been an incident, foreseen and provided for, the world might have been a paradise. As a matter of fact, it will become a paradise only at the completion of the redemptive work of Christ. Kreibig, Versöhnung, 369—“The death of Christ was accompanied by startling occurrences in the outward world, to show that the effects of his sacrifice reached even into nature.” Perowne refers _Ps. 96:10_—“_The world also is established that it cannot be moved_”—to the restoration of the inanimate creation; _cf._ _Heb. 12:27_—“_And this word, Yet once more, signifieth the removing of those things that are shaken, as of things that have been made, that those things which are not shaken may remain_”; _Rev. 21:1, 5_—“_a new heaven and a new earth ... Behold, I make all things new._”