a life, or a theory of life, in forgetfulness of the steady downward thrust of human nature, or in denial of the reality and universality of the evil that is in the world. Hidden it may be; dormant it may be; unrealized it may be in the fulness of its possibilities and powers. The river sleeps in the smoothness of its flow. The force that draws all foreheads downward to the dust is checked and countervailed by other forces. But evil is always there, a potency of disaster and destruction. All the ills that have been wrought in the world come from that secret source. form they are manifold. In origin and essence they are one. In The genesis of evil. II The Unanswerable Question How came evil into being? This is the question which man has always asked, and to which he has never found a perfect answer. He cannot help asking it, because curiosity, in the nobler sense of the word, is the mainspring of his mind. When man ceases to question he ceases to think. He cannot find the perfect answer, because his reason is limited and conditioned, and because his intellectual power itself has developed under the shadow, and within the sphere, of the very malign presence which he seeks to account for. A spirit whose life was beyond the influence of evil might be able to understand and solve the problem of its origin. But even so, it would hardly be possible for such a spirit to communicate this knowledge to other spirits who were born and lived within the domain of evil. And yet, that man should ask this question, and continue to ask it after thousands of years of baffled thought and disappointed search, is in itself a hopeful and illuminating fact. It It is a question which implies a faith not to be eradicated, a courage not to be conquered. speaks of a conviction that evil is not eternal, but temporal; not sovereign, but subordinate; not native to the universe, but a foreigner and an intruder. It testifies to man's knowledge that evil is not the whole, but a part; not the straight line, but the deflection; not a necessary element in the perfect harmony of being, but a false note which breaks the chord. If man should ask, "How came good into being?" he would be in the region of despair. While he continues to ask, "How came evil into being?" he is in the region of hope. All the answers to this question which have been attempted, may be classified under three forms. The first amounts to a denial of the existence of evil. The second destroys the reality of the distinction between evil and good. The third confesses that the primal origin of evil is a mystery, and bids us rest content with a knowledge of its reality and its mode of manifestation in the world. The question of hope. All theories which are based upon the idea of Is evil the essential nothingness of evil, amount to a nothing? practical denial of its existence. Traces of such theories may be found even in Christian writers. A theologian as orthodox as Thomas Aquinas has said, "God created everything that exists; but sin is nothing; so God was not the author of it." In Robert Browning's poem of Abt Vogler, the idea is put into a single verse. "The evil is naught, is null, is silence implying sound." Darkness is but the absence of light. Evil is but the negation of good. The rock upon which all these negative theories go to pieces is the practical conviction that evil is just as real to us in our experience, just as solid, just as operative, as good is. The desire which seeks a wrong pleasure is no less vivid than that which seeks a right pleasure. The will which determines a wicked action is just as strong as that which determines a righteous action. The end sought is no more negative in one case than it is in the other. If evil is a nothing, it is a strangely active, positive, and potent nothing, with all the qualities of a something. The theories which attempt to account for its origin by tracing it to a mere negation or absence of good, raise a harder question than that which they attempt to answer. Instead of asking how evil came into being, we must ask, How did evil, which is a mere nothing, come to have the reality, the life, and the power of a something? All theories which are based upon the idea of Is evil the necessity of evil lead to a practical denial necessary? of the distinction between evil and good. For if the necessity be purely natural, that is to say materialistic, then there is no possible ground for making such a distinction. The inexplicable constitution of the original atoms of the universe has produced mother's love and murderer's hate in precisely the same way, and the one is as good, or as evil, as the other. But if the necessity be ordained by any kind of a Divine Being, then all its results must be according to His will and must serve His purpose. Any essential difference between the evil and the good becomes unimaginable. All that is left is a formal difference, in which evil is good in disguise, a necessary but unrecognized element in the development of the world. We must accept the statement of Pope's Essay on Man: "All nature is but art, unknown to thee; All chance, direction which thou canst not see; All partial evil, universal good; |