“And think how mercifully winter is tempered to us by the snow! When water freezes in the air in winter-time, it does not come pelting down as lumps of ice. Conceivably it might, and then where should we be? But it belongs to the hexagonal system—a system prone to graceful frameworks. It crystallizes into the most delicate and beautiful lace of six-rayed crystals—wonderful under the microscope. They flake delicately. They lie loosely one upon another. Out of ice is woven a warm garment like wool, white like wool because like wool it is full of air—a warm garment for bud and shoot....
“Then again—you revile God for the parasites he sends. But are they not sent to teach us a great moral lesson? Each one for himself and God for us all. Not so the parasites. They choose a life of base dependence. With that comes physical degeneration, swift and sure. They are the Socialists of nature. They lose their limbs. They lose colour, become blenched, unappetising beings, vile creatures of sloth—often microscopic. Do they not urge us by their shameful lives to self help and exertion? Yet even parasites have a use! I am told that were it not for parasitic bacteria man could not digest his food. A lichen again is made up of an alga and a fungus, mutually parasitic. That is called symbiosis—living together for a mutual benefit. Maybe every one of those thousands of parasites you deem so horrible is working its way upward towards an arrangement—”
Sir Eliphaz weighed his words: “Some mutually advantageous arrangement with its host. A paying guest.
“And finally,” said Sir Eliphaz, with the roll of distant thunder in his voice, “think of the stately procession of life upon the earth, through a myriad of forms the glorious crescendo of evolution, up to its climax, man. What a work is man! The paragon of creation, the microcosm of the cosmos, the ultimate birth of time.... And you would have us doubt the guiding hand!”
Mr. Dad made a noise like responses in church.
“A certain beauty in the world is no mark of God’s favour,” said Mr. Huss. “There is no beauty one may not balance by an equal ugliness. The wart-hog and the hyæna, the tapeworm and the stinkhorn, are equally God’s creations. Nothing you have said points to anything but a cold indifference towards us of this order in which we live. Beauty happens; it is not given. Pain, suffering, happiness; there is no heed. Only in the heart of man burns the fire of righteousness.”