30S £SS.1YS IN PHILOSOPHY 



Ground of Things, whether conceived of as conscious or as 

 unknowable, responsible for all that is in life, the evil as well 

 as the good. And the utterly intimate intermingling of the 

 First Cause with all of its effects soever, which these monistic 

 systems all imply, and which some of them frankly maintain, 

 renders this responsibility so direct and complete as to shock 

 all our ideal sensibilities and make reverence for such a 

 Being, vast and mighty as the Being may be, quite impos- 

 sible, — even reverence, not to speak of adoring devotion. 

 How can we revere that which consciously produces or per- 

 mits uncontrolled evil, even on the pretence that it is done 

 for eventual good? How worship that which sins in and 

 with us, even if this sinning be for ultimate universal peni- 

 tence and amendment? Or how can we commit our guid- 

 ance, devoutly, to that of which we cannot say whether it is 

 conscious or unconscious, and into whose counsels, or whose 

 drift, if perchance it have any, we cannot possibly penetrate? 

 It is condemnation, not recommendation of these systems, 

 to any moral mind, when their advocates declare, as some- 

 times they do, that " the God of things as they are is the 

 God of things as they ought to be." A mind heartily moral 

 knows better, when the poet, however plausibly, declares 

 that " whatever is is right." As moral beings, we know that 

 much which is is wrong, and is in no way palliable, or even 

 to be tolerated, by a good being ; yes, that our whole busi- 

 ness with it is simply to get rid of it, and to bring on a state 

 of the world in which it shall no longer have room to exist. 

 This same responsibility for evil, even for sin, is also car- 

 ried back upon God by the systems in our first group. The 

 predestinating Sovereign, the universal Maker, cannot escape 

 the contagion of the evil and the wickedness that pervades 

 the world which he creates and from moment to moment 

 sustains. Even the natural evil in the world, however re- 

 garded as a means of greater good, is so extensively admin- 

 istered with a reckless hand, absolutely regardless of the 



