362 MAN AND GOD. 



planatlon of Evil ; the world is evil because it is 

 imperfectly harmonized with the divine will. And 

 yet as God is not all things, He can be an ''eternal 

 (or unceasing) tendency making for righteousness," 

 and need not be, as on all other theories He must 

 be, the responsible Author of Evil. For when once 

 the identification of God with the whole of Nature 

 is given up, the evil in the world may be due to that 

 element in it which is not God, to the resistance 

 of existences God cannot destroy and has not yet 

 reconciled. And there are many points about the 

 specific character of evil which bear out this inter- 

 pretation. 



§ 25. For let us compare the deductions from 

 such a theory of the nature of Evil with the facts 

 we find. We start with a number of spiritual beings 

 struggling against and opposing the Divine Power, 

 which may overpower, but cannot destroy them. 

 What is to be done ? To leave them in the full 

 possession of their powers and intelligence w^ould be 

 to give them the power to do evil, to reduce the 

 spiritual order to a chaotic play of wild antagonisms. 

 To destroy them is impossible. But it is possible to 

 do the next best thing, viz., to reduce their conscious- 

 ness to the verge of non-existence. In such a state 

 of torpor it would be possible to induce them to give 

 an all but unconscious assent to the laws of the 

 cosmos, and gradually to accustom them to the order 

 which the divine wisdom had seen to be the best, 

 and the best means to attain a perfectly harmonious 

 co-operation of all existences. And as they grow 

 more harmonized, a higher development of con- 

 sciousness, and a higher phase of life becomes per- 

 missible. Nevertheless every advance in conscious- 

 ness renders possible a correspondingly intense 



