পাতা:বঙ্গদর্শন-চতুর্থ খণ্ড.djvu/৩৪

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এই পাতাটির মুদ্রণ সংশোধন করা প্রয়োজন।

. هوي মিল, ডার্বিন, এবং হিন্দুধৰ্ম্ম। | মনুষ্য প্রতি ঈশ্বরের আচরণের পক্ষ সম| খন করিতে আপনাদিগকে যোগ্য বিবে: চনা করিয়াছেন, তাহাদিগের মধ্যে র্যাহারা মতবৈপরীত্য শূন্য, তাহার કરે সিদ্ধান্ত হইতে নিস্তার পাইবার জন্য, হৃদয়কে কঠিন ভাবাপন্ন করিয়া স্থির করিয়াছেন যে, দুঃখ অশুভ নহে । । তাহারা বলেন যে, ঈশ্বরকে দয়াময় বলায়

nature does also this to all but | a small percentage of lives, and does it in all the modes, violent , or insidious in which the worst human beings take the lives of one another. Nature impales men, breaks them as if on the wheel, casts them to be devoured by | wild beasts, burns them to death, crushes them with stones, like the first Christian Martyr, starves them with hunger, freezes, them with cold, poisons them by the quick or slow venom of her *exhalations, and has hundreds of other hideous deaths, such as the ingenious cruelty of a Nabis or a Domitiam never sùrpassed. All this Nature does with the most supercilious disregard both of mercy and of justice, emptying her shafts upon the best and noblest indifferently with the meanest and worst; upon those | who are engaged in the highest | and worthiest enterpries,and often | as the direct consequence of the noblest acts; and it might uman race for generations to

  • I are nature's dealings with life.

almost be imagined as a punish-, ment for them. She mows down || those on whose existence hangs. of the well-being of a whole people, o |ို့" of the prospects of the l | come, with as little compunction : as those whose death is a relief, to themselves and to those under . their noxious influence. Such Even when she does not intend too kill, she inflicts the same tortures | in apparent wantonness. In the clumsy provision which she has made for that perpetual ‘renewal of animal life, rendered necessary by the prompt termination she puts to it in every individual instance, no human being over comes into the world but another human being is literally stretched on the rack for hours or days, not un- frequently issuing in death. Next to taking life (equal to it according to a high authority) is taking the means by which we live; and nature does this too on the largest scale, and with the most callous indifference. A single hurricane destroys the hopes of a season, a flight of locusts or an inundation desolates a district; a trifling chemical change in an edible root starves a million of people. The waves of the sca, liko banditti seize and appropriate the wealth of the rich and the little all of the poor with the same accom paniments of stripping, wound ing, and killing as their human || prototypes. Every thing in short which the worst men commit either against life or property is perpetrated on a larger scale by natural agents. Nature has Noyades more fatal than those of Carrier; her explosions of fire damp are as destructive as human artillery; her plague and cholera far surpass the poison cups of the Borgias......Anarchy and the Reign of Terror are overmatched. “in injustice, ruin, and death by a urricane and a pestilence.--Mill * on Nature. p. p. 28–31. . . . . .