Life's Dark Problems Audiobook By Minot J. Savage cover art

Life's Dark Problems

Or, Is This a Good World?

 Virtual Voice Sample

$0.00 for first 30 days

Try for $0.00
Access a growing selection of included Audible Originals, audiobooks, and podcasts.
You will get an email reminder before your trial ends.
Audible Plus auto-renews for $7.95/mo after 30 days. Upgrade or cancel anytime.

Life's Dark Problems

By: Minot J. Savage
Narrated by: Virtual Voice
Try for $0.00

$7.95 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $5.99

Buy for $5.99

Confirm purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use, License, and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.
Cancel
Background images

This title uses virtual voice narration

Virtual voice is computer-generated narration for audiobooks.

About this listen

 IT is indeed a strange scene that lies before us as we look out over the face of the earth and of human society. It is not at all, I suppose, the kind of world that any of us would have thought a wise and strong and good God would have created. It seems to us unreasonable, and it seems cruel.

Note the conditions beneath our feet, among the lowest forms of life, the grasses, the shrubs, the trees,—a contest going on none the less deadly because unconscious and unaccompanied by pain. The earth itself is a strange home for a sensitive and possibly suffering people, — earthquakes, volcanoes, cyclones, tidal waves, pestilences, poisons, powers of possible evil, on every hand.

And, when we come up the next step higher, and look at the state of affairs in the animal world, we behold a scene of strife, superficially beautiful but also apparently cruel.

I believe that on the whole it is a scene of gladness and joy; and yet so many things of another and opposite character are thrust in our faces,—the serpent with his poisonous fangs lying in wait, the spider weaving his web for his victim, the hawk ready to swoop down upon the beautiful singing bird, wild beasts fighting in the jungles, fishes devouring one another in the seas and rivers.

So it is no wonder, looking at it in this way, that Tennyson should talk about

“Nature red in tooth and claw
With ravin,”

that he should speak of this same nature as shrieking against the creed of trust in the universal goodness and love.
And, when we front this human nature of ours, we find something more cruel than we discover among the lower forms of animal life, because here are ingenuity, able to devise more cruel methods,—hatred, wars, crimes of every kind, disease, pain, thwarted lives, blighted hopes, blasted ambitions, evils physical, mental, moral, spiritual.
And the great problem challenges us as to whether in the face of these we can still believe in the goodness of things,—not only the goodness, but the wisdom. Some of the greatest writers of the world have tried their hand at the solution of this enigma.

Milton tells us that he wrote his great epic to “justify the ways of God to men.” Pope writes his famous Essay “to vindicate the ways of God to man.” And so writers both of prose and poem have tried to find a way through this great darkness which has so bewildered the eyes and burdened the hearts of the race.
Here is the creed of Pope:

“All nature is but art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good;
And, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite,
One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.”

Can we really believe that? If we can, why, then we can sing with Browning,—

“God’s in His heaven,
All’s right with the world.”

But let us see what John Stuart Mill thought about it. Yet note the significant fact that he wrote before the modern theory of evolution had been demonstrated. And this theory of evolution completely flanks his difficulty, in my judgment.

What is it that Mill says? He says it is plain, in the face of the evils of the world, that God cannot at the same time be almighty and all-wise and all-good. If He is almighty, then He either fails in wisdom or goodness. If He is all-wise, then He is not strong enough to have His way, or else He is not quite good enough to care. If He is all-good, then He must lack either wisdom or power. Because, if He were all three, the universe would be perfect.

This is the dilemma which this great thinker presented to the world. But when we remember that the universe is in process, and not yet complete, we have a right to decline to accept either horn of Mr. Mill’s dilemma, and still seek for a solution of our difficulty.

 Christianity
No reviews yet