IMPORTANCE OF THE DOCTRINE 219 



I have also called your attention to the fact that our 

 belief in divine righteousness is imperilled by the sup- 

 position that man's existing incapacity to avoid sin 

 represents the condition in which God constituted our 

 first parents when He made them responsible agents.^ 

 The necessity for moral endeavours of belief in divine 

 righteousness is too obvious intelligently to be denied. 

 It seems worth while, however, again to emphasize the 

 incongruity between an exclusively evolutionary view of 

 the origin of man's sinful tendencies and the truth of 

 divine justice. Under the conditions of human knowl- 

 edge during this earthly Hfe, the problem of evil can 

 never cease to be a problem. Theodicies that claim to 

 be adequate really explain away the fact of sin and are 

 therefore altogether futile. Sin is a fact, and it con- 

 stitutes a seeming infringement upon either the power 

 or the righteousness of God. We grant that without the 

 capability of sinning being given to men by God the 

 development of a kingdom of human righteousness 

 could not be achieved, for real freedom in choosing 

 between good and evil appears to be involved in the 

 development of human character. Yet we do not 

 escape the difficulty that sin, once committed, and in 

 whatever degree of culpabihty, looks Hke either a failure 

 of divine arrangements or a result of divine connivance 

 with evil. To suppose that God may do evil that good 

 may come is impossible for those who perceive what 

 evil means. We are precluded by all our knowledge 

 of God from beheving that the origin of sin is due to 



* Cf. pp. 170-175, above. 



