376 ELIZABETH CABY AGASSIZ 



was felt to be pleasant. Such days are exciting, but 

 they leave lovely memories. Dinner, ten in all, count- 

 ing myself. Kate made a beautiful cake — no candles; 

 seventy-nine were due, but that would have made a 

 deep hole in the candle-box, beside being a very 

 serious comment upon my old age. 



January 5, 1902. — Having finished Martineau's 

 biography I am now reading his Study of Religion. 

 Far be it from me to say I understand it. 



January 11. — Still reading Martineau's Study of 

 Religion, It is very interesting, but I confess that all 

 the efforts to prove that the presence of evil in the 

 world is part of the beneficence of God seem to me 

 futile; that without a sinner, for instance, you cannot 

 have a saint, — without sensitiveness to pain we can- 

 not have sensitiveness to pleasure. When we think of 

 the nameless crimes committed on the earth together 

 with the open record of horror and suffering one would 

 think that no being at once beneficent and all-powerful 

 would make a world which includes such possibilities. 

 Perhaps the other life when we come to it may ex- 

 plain this one. But all these arguments drawn from 

 the idea that good is impossible without evil (which 

 is just what we believe Heaven to be) seem to me a 

 begging of the question. Is Heaven then impossible 

 without Hell ? — One would answer " impossible with 

 Hell, " since the knowledge that others are in mortal 

 suffering while you are free from all pain or sorrow 

 would in itself impair all conscious enjoyment of 

 your own happiness. And yet there is "a soul of good 

 in all things evil." For good may we read God? 



