A Cynic Looks at Life

It is not always on remote islands peopled with pagans that great disasters occur, as memory witnesseth.  Nor are the forces of nature inadequate to production of a fiercer throe than any that we have known.  The situation is this:  we are tied by the feet to a fragile shell imperfectly confining a force powerful enough under favoring conditions, to burst it asunder and set the fragments wallowing and grinding together in liquid flame, in the blind fury of a readjustment.  Nay, it needs no such stupendous cataclysm to depeople this uneasy orb.  Let but a square mile be blown out of the bottom of the sea, or a great rift open there.  Is it to be supposed that we would be unaffected in the altered conditions generated by a contest between the ocean and the earth’s molten core?  These fatalities are not only possible but in the highest degree probable.  It is probable, indeed, that they have occurred over and over again, effacing all the more highly organized forms of life, and compelling the slow march of evolution to begin anew.  Slow?  On the stage of Eternity the passing of races—­the entrances and exits of Life—­are incidents in a brisk and lively drama, following one another with confusing rapidity.

Mankind has not found it practicable to abandon and avoid those places where the forces of nature have been most malign.  The track, of the Western tornado is speedily repeopled.  San Francisco is still populous, despite its earthquake, Galveston despite its storm, and even the courts of Lisbon are not kept by the lion and the lizard.  In the Peruvian village straight downward into whose streets the crew of a United States warship once looked from the crest of a wave that stranded her a half mile inland are heard the tinkle of the guitar and the voices of children at play.  There are people living at Herculaneum and Pompeii.  On the slopes about Catania the goatherd endures with what courage he may the trembling of the ground beneath his feet as old Enceladus again turns over on his other side.  As the Hoang-Ho goes back inside its banks after fertilizing its contiguity with hydrate of China-man the living agriculturist follows the receding wave, sets up his habitation beneath the broken embankment, and again the Valley of the Gone Away blossoms as the rose, its people diving with Death.

This matter can not be amended:  the race exposes itself to peril because it can do no otherwise.  In all the world there is no city of refuge—­no temple in which to take sanctuary, clinging to the horns of the altar—­no “place apart” where, like hunted deer, we can hope to elude the baying pack of Nature’s malevolences.  The dead-line is drawn at the gate of life:  Man crosses it at birth.  His advent is a challenge to the entire pack—­earthquake, storm, fire, flood, drought, heat, cold, wild beasts, venomous reptiles, noxious insects, bacilli, spectacular plague and velvet-footed household disease—­all are fierce and tireless in pursuit.  Dodge, turn and double how he can, there’s no eluding them; soon or late some of them have him by the throat and his spirit returns to the God who gave it—­and gave them.

We are told that this earth was made for our inhabiting.  Our dearly beloved brethren in the faith, our spiritual guides, philosophers and friends of the pulpit, never tire of pointing out the goodness of God in giving us so excellent a place to live in and commending the admirable adaptation of all things to our needs.

What a fine world it is, to be sure—­a darling little world, “so suited to the needs of man.”  A globe of liquid fire, straining within a shell relatively no thicker than that of an egg—­a shell constantly cracking and in momentary danger of going all to pieces!  Three-fourths of this delectable field of human activity are covered with an element in which we can not breathe, and which swallows us by myriads: 

  With moldering bones the deep is white
  From the frozen zones to the tropic bright.

Of the other one-fourth more than one-half is uninhabitable by reason of climate.  On the remaining one-eighth we pass a comfortless and precarious existence in disputed occupancy with countless ministers of death and pain—­pass it in fighting for it, tooth and nail, a hopeless battle in which we are foredoomed to defeat.  Everywhere death, terror, lamentation and the laughter that is more terrible than tears—­the fury and despair of a race hanging on to life by the tips of its fingers.  And the prize for which we strive, “to have and to hold”—­what is it?  A thing that is neither enjoyed while had, or missed when lost.  So worthless it is, so unsatisfying, so inadequate to purpose, so false to hope and at its best so brief, that for consolation and compensation we set up fantastic faiths of an aftertime in a better world from which no confirming whisper has ever reached us across the void.  Heaven is a prophecy uttered by the lips of despair, but Hell is an inference from analogy.