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There have been rainbows, gems, and shells, and birds of heavenly plumage that perished unseen of men, away in the forgotten youth of the Almighty; dark plagues have wrapped in frightful death their millions unrecorded, and the cries of famished nations have pierced the dome of heaven, partly to excite our restless souls, and make us wonder at the ways of God. So when we suffer, we are making food for the soul of man: and if no eye beholds our suffering save the eye of our Father in heaven, we do not suffer in vain, either for ourselves or others. Have not we been fed with the thought that many a poor fellow has poured out his soul to God in the wilderness, or on a wreck, or shut in the horrid bowels of the earth, where none but the Almighty listened? Did not He teach us that these things are true we should not believe them. We cannot have fiction without truth, nor dreams without experience. All things are inspired by one Being, to one end. There is no imposture, waste, nor confusion, but an infinite variety, fitted to the infinite destiny of the soul. And many a calamity, dark and terrible, has cut men off from this world (perchance into a better) that we might wonder rather than despair.

The only limit that benevolence will prescribe to this variety is, that its extremities should not proceed so far as to produce unmitigated and uncompensated evil. If Samson was the strongest of men, or if Goliath of Gath was the largest of men, we shall require that these were strong and large enough; and that for them to have been stronger, or larger, were to have produced absolute evil. And truly, a man who