330 PRESENT-DAY RATIONALISM 



words may be said — " But brothers, you can end it when 

 you will ". 



But to the Theist the question remains : " Can this 

 problem of Evil be solved ? " This author seems to 

 think not ; that attempts hitherto have all been failures 

 and " must forever remain a failure". "The fatal mis- 

 take has been the attempt to unite this universal causality 

 of God with His essence as Love." 



He concludes by saying : " Indubitably, we stand in 

 need of a new idealism, which shall be so thoroughly 

 pluralistic, as to avoid both forms of literal Creationism — 

 whether the Dualism of the Hebrew or the Monism of 

 modern thinking — and which, while it refers Nature and 

 all its woes derivatively to minds, presents as the minds 

 other than God, and places God in a purely ideal or final- 

 causal relation to them, and thus to the system of Nature 

 dependent upon them ". 



This appeal to " minds other than God " does not 

 seem feasible in the face of the Laws of Continuity and 

 the Conservation of Energy. 



Rev. R. A. Armstrong in the second essay begins by 

 reminding us that the St. Vincent catastrophe is by no 

 means peculiar, and that 215,000 people were overwhelmed 

 by a wave in the Ganges in 1891. "In fact they are 

 no more terrible or more sad than the normal," and 

 minimises the effects by adding : " Death left mourners 

 few and rare. A multitude were spared the sorrows of 

 orphanage or widowhood. Where for these was death's 

 sting ?"..." We have not to ask ' Were these men of 

 Martinique sinners above the rest?' but rather, ' What 

 were these husbands and wives, parents and children, 

 lovers and beloved of Martinique, that God blessed them 

 thus above the rest, robbing death of its sting, the grave 

 of its victory ? ' " 



