THE ELIMINATION OF EVIL. 365 



civilized life render murder too dangerous a pastime. 

 Physically, also, his conduct will be more prudent, 

 for he will find that the more complex dissipations 

 of modern Hfe are more exhausting to his physical 

 powers than the simpler debaucheries of the savage. 



Thus Evil is impotent and infra-human, in our 

 world at least, rather than superhuman. And such 

 a character of Evil serves to further the world- 

 process indirectly also. It makes the attitude of 

 resistance to the Divine Purpose ridiculous, con- 

 temptible, and disgusting, as well as futile. The 

 adversary of God is not a defiant fiend, armed with 

 archangelic powers and irreconcilable in the intense 

 consciousness of his undying hate, not the Demon 

 we had been wont to fear, but the beast we had been 

 wont to despise, a sordid swine, whose narrow out- 

 look over the nature of things is limited by the 

 barriers of his garbage, and the boundaries of his 

 sty. And so the nature of our world confirms what 

 we ought to have conjectured beforehand, viz., that 

 the divine wisdom does not permit the world to be 

 made a playground for devils, but imposes upon 

 Evil disabilities which minimize its power to thwart 

 the purposes of God and to affect the course of 

 history. 



§ 26. And so we find that Evil is that which resists 

 the Evolution of the world, and fights a losing battle 

 against the tendencies of things. It consists in this, 

 that the end Is not yet, that the purpose of the world- 

 process is still being achieved, that the discordant 

 elements are still being harmonized, and that hence 

 what is cannot yet realize what otcg/U to be. 



But though on this account Evil is an inseparable 

 element in our world, an ineradicable element in all 

 existing things, yet from the beginning Afo? S^ereXeiero 



