CREATIVE NONFICTION 71When we reflect on the perpetual destruction of
organic life, we should also recollect, that it is perpetu-
ally renewed in other forms by the same materials,
and thus the sum total of happiness of the world
continues undiminished; and that a philosopher may
thus smile again on turning his eyes from the coffins of
nature to her cradles.One can almost imagine Erasmus, thinking of the
cradles in which his own babes lay, grasping for
some underlying goodness in it all. Once we aban-
don the comforting fairy tale that men and women
of prior ages were not as attached to their children,
we can see the author’s deep experience with the
large potential for misery and suffering in the world
within these lines. (The fairy tale was apparently
first told by the social historian Philip Aries in his
1960 book, Centuries of Childhood. Perhaps it is an
indication of how truly unimaginable such a state
of existence was by the mid-twentieth century; so
unimaginable that it was imagined away. Historians
of the early modern period have provided exten-
sive—and heartbreaking—evidence that mothers
and fathers experienced extreme anguish at the loss
of their children.) Erasmus insisted there must be a
Goodness to it all, despite puerperal fever robbing
young husbands of their wives. Despite the dozens
of infectious diseases that robbed young mothers of
their infant children. But one had to take the long-
term view to witness such goodness, to see that the
good outweighed the bad and that “the sum total
of happiness of organized nature” increased, rather
than diminished, with death. And this is where
things really get interesting. For in contrast to John
Ray, Erasmus believed in transmutation—evolu-
tion, in modern parlance. In his view, progressive
change in biological forms provided good evidence
of an overall Goodness to the plan of creation,
despite death and struggle. Hope could also cling
to the intellectual and technological progress of
mankind, rooted in the study of natural law:
Last, at thy potent nod, Effect and Cause
Walk hand in hand accordant to thy laws;
Rise at Volition’s call, in groups combined,
Amuse, delight, instruct and serve Mankind.A footnote explained how those who discover
causation furnish the powers of producing effects.
These were the men who discovered and
improved the sciences “which meliorate and
adorn the condition of humanity.” For Erasmus,
both the evolutionary progress of life and the
intellectual progress of man proved the goodness
of the system. Though the distance of Erasmus’s
“First Cause”—which created the rule of natural
law “perhaps millions of ages before the com-
mencement of the history of mankind”—would
have caused John Ray great distress, he would
have sympathized with the belief in science as the
means of ameliorating the human condition. And
certainly he agreed that, on balance, the system
proved God Good.
The thread evident in both Ray’s and Erasmus
Darwin’s work might be called a “Science
as God’s Provision to Ameliorate Suffering”
theodicy. And it is perhaps most eloquently
stated in the concluding pages of Vestiges of the
Natural History of Creation, a Victorian sensation
published anonymously in 1844. Scientists,
including Charles Darwin’s mentor Adam
Sedgwick, condemned the book as atheistic,
and historians note his reaction as at least partly
explaining Darwin’s famous twenty-year delay in
publishing On the Origin of Species. We now know
the author of Vestiges was Robert Chambers, a
Scottish publisher; when asked why he had not
put his name to his work, Chambers gestured to
the house in which resided his eleven children
and replied, “I have eleven reasons.” The
concluding chapter of Vestiges provides a telling
portrait of what was at stake for some Victorian
readers faced with either a close versus a distant
Creator (a distinction that often mapped onto
static versus evolutionary creations): “How, the
sage has asked in every age,” Chambers wrote,
“should a Being so transcendently kind, have
allowed of so large an admixture of evil in the
condition of his creatures?” The question must
have pressed on Chambers and his wife, Anne,
amid the death of three of their fourteen children
in infancy. In the pages of Vestiges, Chambers’s
reply to the age-old question was as follows: The
fixed laws established by the Deity were his most
august works, permitting great good. But left
to act independently of each other, those laws
could have effects only generally beneficial, since
often there must be interference of one law with