Hardy uses events in his novels to illustrate that random chance rather than "God's plan for our lives" is the decisive factor in what happens to people. For his characters, events are often tragic, for if they produced happy outcomes, we as readers would tend to attribute this to God's plan rather than random fate.
In Jude the Obscure, working class Jude Fawley climbs on a ladder and sees the spires of Christminster (Oxford) in the distance and decides this is a sign he must go there, for he understands Christminster as a "city of life" where he desires to learn and become a scholar. However, Christminster as a "sign" is deceptive: it becomes a place of tragedy for Jude. There was no God signaling to him to go there: that was his own imagination at work.
In Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Tess could have been saved near the end by the kind Clares but she overhears them gossiping in a way that keeps her from approaching them, and instead, her life ends tragically. It didn't have to be this way: it was simply an accident without meaning.
Hardy doesn't offer much hope in a world ruled by random chance, where good people like Jude and Tess are ground up by an indifferent universe. In Tess, Hardy suggests that it is better to live day-to-day, rather than to weave abstract theories about how God and the world interconnect or to look for "signs" of Providence. One of the happiest interludes in Tess occurs when she is working at the dairy, living simply and primally, not planning or attempting to over-interpret life, but getting up in the mornings, milking the cows with the other milkmaids and enjoying the present moment for what it is.
The Victorian novel often operated on coincidences that worked for the benefits of the protagonist, as if a benevolent God were looking out for good people: Hardy anticipates the disillusionment of the post-World War I world in his bleak novels where bad things happen to good people for no reason at all.
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