belief in a future wherein all shall be well with all. By Mr. Justice Stephen's optimistic cynicism she is not unnaturally irritated; he remarked that "a man who cannot occupy every waking moment of a long life with some one or other of these things [friendship, politics, commerce, literature, science, and art] must be either very unfortunate in regard to his health, or else must be a poor creature". In answer to this she writes: "It is not necessary to be either unfortunate oneself or a very 'poor creature' to feel that the wrongs and agonies of this world of pain are absolutely intolerable unless we can be assured that they will be righted hereafter; that 'there is a God who judgeth the earth', and that all the oppressed and miserable of our race, aye, and even the tortured brutes, are beheld by him. . . . . Not that which is 'poorest' in us, but that which is richest and noblest, refuses to 'occupy every moment of a long life' with our own ambitions and amusements, or to shut out deliberately from our minds the 'riddle of the painful earth '." To us there is but small comfort in Miss Cobbe's assurance that earth's "wrongs and agonies" "will be righted hereafter". Granting for a moment that man survives death, what certainty have we that "the next world" will be any improvement on this? Miss Cobbe assures us that this is "God's world"; whose world will the next be, if not also his? Will he be stronger there or better, that he should set right in that world the wrongs he has permitted here? Will he have changed his mind, or have become weary of the contemplation of suffering? To me the thought that the world was in the hands of a God who permitted all the present wrongs and pains to exist would be intolerable, maddening in its hopelessness. There is every hope of righting earth's wrongs and of curing earth's pains if the reason and skill of man which have already done so much are free to do the rest; but if they are to strive against omnipotence, hopeless indeed is the future of the world. It is in this sense that the Atheist looks on good as "the final goal of ill", and believing that that goal will be reached the sooner the more strenuous the efforts of each individual, he works in the glad certainty that he is aiding the world's progress thitherward. Not dreaming of a personal reward hereafter, not craving a personal payment from a heavenly treasury, he works and loves, content that he is building a future fairer than his present, joyous that he is creating a new earth for a happier race.
