238 



deviations from an ancestral type, which was not parasitical.* 

 The parasitic habit is thus looked upon as an acquired one. 

 But still, after all, as we must suppose that the Creator im- 

 planted in animals this capacity for variation, we do not seem 

 to advance much nearer a solution of the problem by this 

 consideration. 



9. Diseases mid Death. — Some diseases are so intimately con- 

 nected with moral evil that they cannot be considered as purely 

 physical consequents of purely physical antecedents. Many are 

 the direct result of vicious habits, or of neglect of the laws of 

 health, or of ignorance, if not on the part of the individual suf- 

 ferer, yet on that of the community at large. That this class of 

 evils is gradually passing more and more under man^s control 

 is an undoubted fact, and we may hope for still greater progress 

 in this direction. Still, though we may lengthen the average 

 duration of human life, and prolong the existence of the weak 

 and sickly, death must come sooner or later — the greatest evil 

 of all to those who have not the Christian hope of immortality. 

 But, surely, the Pessimists ought to welcome it as their best 

 friend, if they really believe life to be so intolerable. The 

 fact that Arthur Schopenhauer lived to be seventy-two, and 

 wanted to live till eighty, seems to show that even Pessimists 

 resemble ordinary mortals in not always acting up to their 

 creed. 



10, Moral Evil. — If the problem of Evil in general is a 

 difficulty, that difficulty is enhanced tenfold when we come to 

 the origin of Moral Evil or Sin. How could a God of infinite 

 goodness permit this source of misery to originate among 

 His creatures, and why did He do so ? That it has originated 

 somehow is a fact of experience, witnessed to by our individual 

 consciousness, and by the unanimous voice of history. Whence 

 did it come ? Unde malum et quare, as Tertullian succinctly puts 

 it. Plutarch (born about A.D. 50, died A.D. 125) thus clearly 

 states the difficulty in a passage of his work, De Iside et Osiride, 

 45 :t "For if nothing can be produced naturally without a cause, 

 and the Good can not act as the cause of Evil, it is necessary 

 that the natural development of evil also, as well as of good, 

 must have its own generation and cause." Many attempts 

 were consequently made to assign this cause. In the dreamy 

 East the ancient Persians assumed the existence of two great 



* To give one instance out of many, Dr. Bastian thinks that the Guinea- 

 worm is merely an accidental parasite, and that formerly it was a free or 

 nonparasitic Nematoid. — Globe Encycl. sub voce ''Guinea-worm." 



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