3l8 MAN AND GOD. 



things are good, or that God himself is evil ; but 

 in either case the value of the human distinction is 

 destroyed. From the standpoint of an infinite 

 Deity, on the other hand, all things must be good, 

 for they depend absolutely on his will, and it is 

 his will that all things should be what they are. 

 God alone is responsible for all that happens, and 

 every action is wholly God's and wholly good. 

 And yet a true instinct tells us that the distinction 

 of good and evil is a vital one, that things are not 

 perfect, that Evil is as real as Good, as real as life, 

 as real as we are, as real as our whole world and 

 its process, and that it can be explained away only 

 at the cost of dissolving the world into a baseless 

 dream. 



Yet this is precisely what this unhappy dogma 

 of the infinity of God leads to ; it denies the reality 

 of evil, because it denies the reality and destroys 

 the rationality of the whole world. So long as we 

 deal with finite factors, the function of pain and the 

 nature of Evil can be more or less understood, but 

 as soon as it is supposed to display the working of 

 an infinite power, everything becomes wholly unin- 

 telligible. We can no longer console ourselves 

 with the hope that " good becomes the final goal of 

 ill," we can no longer fancy that imperfection serves 

 any secondary purpose in the economy of the uni- 

 verse. A process by which evil becomes good is 

 unintelligible as the action of a truly infinite power 

 which can attain its end without a process ; it is 

 absurd to ascribe imperfection as a secondary result 

 to a power which can attain all its aims without 

 evil. Hence the world- process, and the intelligent 

 purpose we fancy we detect in it, must be illusory, 

 in precisely the same way and for precisely the 



