I 



THE MYSTERY OF EVIL. 315 



to him all things are good, and in the second, because 

 the distinction of good and evil must be entirely 

 unmeaning. To put the difficulty in its homeliest 

 form, God cannot be both all-good and all-powerful, 

 in a world in which evil is a reality. For if God 

 is all-powerful everything must be exactly what it 

 should be, from God's point of view, else He would 

 instantly alter it. If, then, evil things exist, it must 

 be because God wills to have it so, i.e., because God 

 IS, from our point of view, evil. Or conversely, if 

 God is good. He must put up with the continuance 

 of evil because He cannot remove it. This is the 

 * terrible mystery of evil ' which for 2,000 years has 

 been a stumbling-block to all practical religion, tried 

 the faith of all believers, and depressed and debased 

 all thought on the ultimate questions of life, and is 

 as ' insoluble a mystery ' to theologians now as it 

 was In the beginning. And it is perhaps likely to 

 remain so, seeing that, as Goethe says, "a complete 

 contradiction is alike mysterious to wise men and to 

 fools," and that no labour can ever extract any sense 

 out of a orratuitous combination of incoherent words. 



o 



Hence it is not surprising that no attempt at re- 

 conciling the divine goodness with divine power has 

 ever been successful ; indeed, the only way in which 

 they have ever appeared to be successful was either 

 by covertly limiting the divine power, or by misusing 

 the term goodness in some non-human sense, to 

 denote a quality shown in God's action towards 

 imaginary beings other than man. 



Thus Leibnitz's famous Theodicy, e.g., depends 

 on a limitation of God. For to show that the 

 world is the best of all possible worlds is to imply 

 that not all worlds were possible, so that the best 

 possible did not turn out a perfect one. 



