It is not strange if we are tempted to despair of good. We ask too much. Our religions and moralities have been trimmed to flatter us, till they are all emasculate and sentimentalised, and only please and weaken.
Truth is of a rougher strain.
In the harsh face of life, faith can read a bracing gospel. I Of the Kosmos in the last resort, science reports many doubtful things and all of them appalling. But take the Kosmos with a grosser faith, as our senses give it us. This vital putrescence of the dust, used as we are to it, yet strikes us with occasional disgust, and the profusion of worms in a piece of ancient turf, or the air of a marsh darkened with insects, will sometimes check our breathing so that we aspire for cleaner places. But of the locomotory, to which we ourselves belong, we can tell more.