Chance may be defined, then, as the absence of certainty; as the presence of risk; as a result for which no motive is to be given; as an effect without any apparent cause; as something which man cannot and God does not control; as the act of a man done in the dark; as the result of two or more wills acting independently of each other; as the result of natural laws irregularly carried out or unskilfully put in practice.

We hold that the will of man is free, and being free is not governed by the Creator, nor even in ordinary cases is influenced by Him; nor, being free, is it subject in a normal state to any other will; consequently a man's resolutions are of his own will, and these resolutions lead to acts which when performed without the guiding motive of any particular love or affection, or from any particular reason, intention, or desire, but done arbitrarily and blindly as it were and without special meaning or aim, are involuntary, are unproductive of any particular result and constitute acts of pure chance; such are passing one's fingers through one's hair, beginning to walk with one leg or the other foremost as may happen, treading or not upon a straw in the path, and so forth, all of which we hold are properly termed chance acts, and are almost certainly unproductive of any result affecting the person himself or others, as we all know by experience and are taught by good sense; and if anyone were to say that the Lord had directed him in performing such actions, he would be regarded either as insane or impious, and void of sense; yet those who believe in the action of the Deity in most minute matters (and this, logically, if denying free will) would find no difficulty with a little play of imagination, in tracing the destiny of the world itself as being dependent originally on one of these apparently trivial and insignificant acts.

Again, as a man in the darkness of the night may tread upon and kill an insect, and this when he would much rather not have done so; if there is no chance allowed, it is clear that his step must have been directed by a higher power; it was against his own will; it certainly was not through the influence of any other man's will, and consequently could only be referred to the directing will of the Deity, which, we think, every one will admit is irrational, unnatural, and absurd to imagine. Then surely it is chance.

Again, let us place ten balls in a bag, nine black and one white, close our eyes, and then for mere pastime try how often we shall extract the white one in a given number of trials. We may expect or desire whatever result we please, but our expectation and desire are pretty sure to be disappointed and thwarted. Is the Divine will acting in this case? But no sensible man would admit the exercise of such a power in such a matter, on such an occasion; the result is a mere chance, which may be guessed at, indeed, by the theory of probabilities and by mathematical calculations, which are not the effect of any will at all, but of reasoning, and are, moreover, again themselves uncertain in result, and still subject to chance, because the laws which guide such calculations are not exactly ascertained.

Or suppose you play a game of billiards, in which certain laws of motion produce certain and invariable results; if you fail in carrying them out, and make a hazard where you meant to make a cannon, would not any person be considered foolish, if not impious, who should ascribe that result to the will or directing power of the Deity? That would be a mere chance, dependent on your own dexterity, or your want of it, and a sufficient and reasonable cause being thus given for your want of success, you have no right, surely, to ascribe it to any other source, and must not impute it to the Deity.

Again, you may live in the country alone; your wife is taken dangerously ill and you require the doctor; the railway train, let us say, stops at the station a mile off, at a certain hour; you measure your time and set off to meet it, but find the nearest path selected by you (one passing through a neighbour's ground, a friend's perhaps) · is blocked up, owing to some alterations which he has commenced since your last visit, and this obliges you to go by another and a longer route; you lose the train, and in consequence your wife dies before assistance can be obtained. It is evident that this is a mischance arising from the fact of two persons acting independently of each other, each exercising his own will in his own way. Could anyone ascribe the result to the will or power of the Deity, as exercised in producing it? Surely not, for a sufficient, and that a natural cause, has been discovered for the result,

and to ascribe it, then, to any other cause whatever would be manifestly unnatural, uncalled for, unfair, unreasonable, and unjust.

Now, let us take a more complicated case. Suppose five men, A, B, C, D, and E, acting independently of each other, then will their actions be inevitably uncertain in their result, and will in all probability clash one with another.

Thus A seeks wealth, B, learning, C, a title, D, pleasure, and E, health. Now A may resolve to call on B, to obtain some information serviceable to his purpose; but B having no foreknowledge of A's intention, goes out, and A misses B, but meets E instead, who is taking a walk for his health's sake, E being a person whom A wished particularly to avoid. B, who went out to purchase a book, returns reading it as he walks, and runs up against D, who is looking in at a jeweller's window. B drops his book and spoils it, and D knocks his gold-headed cane through the jeweller's glass, whilst C, who wanted a loan to assist him in his title-hunting purpose, visits A for that object, but finding him not at home, fails to get it, and loses his present chance. Thus all their purposes are mutually crossed, and we hold that their actions having been induced of their own wills, the result to each person is fairly to be regarded as chance.

Did we not allow free will to each one of the five, then indeed we might see in the results the hand of directing Providence, but a sufficient cause for their actions being found, and that cause originating in the free will of each of them, we consider the results are clearly chance, nor can we possibly conceive that the Deity, throughout the universe, would be actively engaged in influencing and producing such results.

Now, all five men were disappointed, principally because they had no foreknowledge of each other's intentions, or because they acted without due care, and without regard to each other's purposes. But in this they neglected the means with which nature had furnished them for avoiding such untoward chances, namely, by prior intimation or communication, and by neglecting to use their eyes for one of the purposes for which they were clearly intended, that is, to prevent people from running up against each other in their walks.

But let us leave possible or probable cases, and proceed to actual events, which can be traced to ascertained causes, and yet which are too frequently, we submit, spoken of as dispensations of Providence."

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The first instance is that of a railway accident, in which an express train was upset, and fell over a viaduct, about twenty people being killed by the fall, and fifty more being injured. This was noticed at the time in some of the papers as "a mysterious dispensation of Providence," and if it was so, this is how the Deity effected His mysterious purpose. The rails at a certain point of the line were out of order, and the engineer consequently gave directions for some workmen to lay down new ones; the head workman of those employed for the purpose took a time-table with him, so as to keep before him the time during which the road would be free from traffic, that he might perform the required work within such time. But he took a wrong time-table with him, one not applicable to that particular day, and whilst the rails were still unreplaced, the express train came up, and the above terrible accident, as we call it, but the above mysterious dispensation of Providence, as others term it, was the result. A result immediately due to want of proper care on the part of the head workman, who did not sufficiently investigate the date of his time-table; a result clearly deducible from such want of care.

Now, either this is a good and sufficient cause why the event took place, which thus becomes what we understand by an accident, or it is not. If admitted to be so, there is no necessity to seek out, nor have we any right or reason to ascribe it to any other cause, and it was an accident perfectly explicable, which might and ought to have been avoided.

But if it is not deemed a sufficient cause, and recourse is had to a directing power above and beyond it—a higher cause-inasmuch as it was certainly not the will of the poor workman that the train should be upset, and so many lives be lost, and as it clearly could not be the will of the passengers, or of any other human will, so must it have resulted from the will of the Deity Himself, who as clearly also had it in His power to prevent it, but would not. And on this principle, which we hold to be irrational

in man and unjust towards the Deity, the so-called religious world describes the occurrence in question as an awful dispensation of Providence, inscrutable in its purpose, and dreadful in its result, yet tending to some great final good, no doubt, as they theoretically assume, and then wind up with commanding us not to question the will and providence of God at all, but to submit ourselves blindly, not to reason or good sense, but to their final decision, in fact.

On the other hand, ordinary people, who judge by what they know and see principally, if they still believe it to have been brought about by the will of the Deity, are inclined in their inmost hearts to regard it as a very cruel and apparently wanton act of injustice; since the good and the bad, young married folk with every prospect of a happy and useful life before them; innocent children, and men on whose existence depended, may be, the wellbeing of whole families, were destroyed equally with any wicked people who might have been in the train, and all underwent indiscriminately a common fate. At best, if not bold enough to question the justice of such a fate, they must be inclined to look askance, and with fear, terror, and mistrust, on a Deity whose ways are so inscrutable, and whose will involves the wholesale destruction of those very beings whom He Himself has called into existence; and who cuts down, without any apparent motive-any motive conceivable to man-that life which He alone has created, and of which He alone is the support.

But, as we have urged before, this theory of the religious (?) world as to the will of God being the cause of this so-called dispensation of Providence is quite a gratuitous assumption, unfounded and radically unjust; a sufficient cause having already been found for the fatal result-that cause being want of proper care; to which, and not to the Deity, so many of the dreadful events from which men suffer are most assuredly to be ascribed.

Another case is that of a great crowd of people, principally women and children, who were congregated together for Divine worship in the Cathedral of Santiago, South America. Some sparks from the pendent lamps lighted for the occasion set fire to the church ornaments. The fire spread to the roof, caught the heavy tapestry