212 CANON W. SAUMAREZ SMITH, B.D. 
and all legitimate inferences from these, it may be urged 
that we are bound to include theological ideas in our investi- 
gation. For example, Christian theology, recognising the 
misery of our present life, teaches that this misery is to be 
more than compensated, in the case of a certain proportion 
of mankind, by future blessings. Now, if this future existence 
is inferable either from historical or other datu, it must 
plainly be included as an element in the life whose value is 
to be determined. Again, this theology tells us that the 
existence of a benevolent and wise Creator is inferable from 
the complex combinations of the world. If so, we may be 
sure that even if human life, so far as we can observe it, seems 
to be other than happy, this defect will be somehow made 
ood.” 
: And in the passage, with an allusion to which I commenced 
the paper, after he has argued that an ‘ wnqualified optimism 
would speedily relax all the higher kinds of moral endeavour,” 
he says that “if we frame a PRACTICAL OPTIMISM, and say that 
life is as good as it could be, provided we make the best of it 
(which seems to be the practical faith of the best Christians), 
we, no doubt, reach an idea most encouraging to effort.” 
Itis of such optimism that I am now to speak. 
2. My object in this paper is not to enter into anything like 
a historical review cf contending theories, or to make a detailed 
criticism of any particular theory, but to submit a philosophical 
estimate of the worth of life, as viewed from a Theistic stand- 
point, and to advocate as reasonable an optimism which is 
neither baseless nor superficial. I believe, with Professor 
Flint, that, ‘‘the true reading of human life, when it is 
surveyed in a_ sufficiently comprehensive way, is not pes- 
simist,” and that we cannot survey it “in a sufficiently 
comprehensive way ” unless we deliberately take into account 
those religious, or theological, data of human experience and 
history, which Mr. Sully acknowledges to be “ facts,” though 
he chooses to exclude them from his line of reasoning, with 
the result that that reasoning becomes “ narrow and partial.” 
The exclusion of these data makes it impossible, too, to be 
content with that “scientific meliorism”? which some have 
suggested as countervailing the gloomy and negative ten- 
dencies of pessimism. For ‘ meliorism,” which stands aloof 
from the acknowledgment of a supreme Divine will, must, in 
the face cf the pessimist’s objections, stop short ‘of being 
a genuine and adequate motive to sustained moral endeavour. * 
* As there will not be many direct quotations in my paper, I may as well 
mention, in a note, some of the books I have consulted in working out my 
