376 ELIZABETH CARY AGASSIZ 
was felt to be pleasant. Such days are exciting, but 
they leave lovely memories. Dinner, ten in all, count- 
ing myself. Kate made a beautiful cake — no candles; 
seventy-nine were due, but that would have made a 
deep hole in the candle-box, beside being a very 
serious comment upon my old age. 
January 5, 1902. — Having finished Martineau’s 
biography I am now reading his Study of Religion. 
Far be it from me to say I understand it. 
January 11. — Still reading Martineau’s Study of 
Religion. It is very interesting, but I confess that all 
the efforts to prove that the presence of evil in the 
world is part of the beneficence of God seem to me 
futile; that without a sinner, for instance, you cannot 
have a saint, — without sensitiveness to pain we can- 
not have sensitiveness to pleasure. When we think of 
the nameless crimes committed on the earth together 
with the open record of horror and suffering one would 
think that no being at once beneficent and all-powerful 
would make a world which includes such possibilities. 
Perhaps the other life when we come to it may ex- 
plain this one. But all these arguments drawn from 
the idea that good is impossible without evil (which 
is just what we believe Heaven to be) seem to me a 
begging of the question. Is Heaven then impossible 
without Hell ? — One would answer “impossible with 
Hell,” since the knowledge that others are in mortal 
suffering while you are free from all pain or sorrow 
would in itself impair all conscious enjoyment of 
your own happiness. And yet there is “a soul of good 
in all things evil.” For good may we read God? 
