And for the same reason I conclude that this world would
never have been left so full of uncertainties, nor human nature
framed so as to find a peculiar joy and exhilaration in meeting them
bravely and cheerfully, if it had not been divinely intended that
most of our amusement and much of our education should come from
this source.
"Chance" is a disreputable word, I know. It is supposed by many
pious persons to be improper and almost blasphemous to use it. But
I am not one of those who share this verbal prejudice. I am
inclined rather to believe that it is a good word to which a bad
reputation has been given. I feel grateful to that admirable
"psychologist who writes like a novelist," Mr. William James, for
his brilliant defence of it. For what does it mean, after all, but
that some things happen in a certain way which might have happened
in another way? Where is the immorality, the irreverence, the
atheism in such a supposition? Certainly God must be competent to
govern a world in which there are possibilities of various kinds,
just as well as one in which every event is inevitably determined
beforehand. St. Peter and the other fishermen-disciples on the Lake
of Galilee were perfectly free to cast their net on either side of
the ship. So far as they could see, so far as any one could see, it
was a matter of chance where they chose to cast it.
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