The religious comfort that a man can get from contemplating all this truth is indeed very different from the consolation of the separate individual as such that many people want their religion to give them. And this very fact furnishes us a good test of moral sincerity. The religious comfort that we find is no comfort save to the truly religious spirit in us. It says to us: “ You that have declared your willingness to serve moral ideals because they are such, does this help you to know, not of a goodly place where you personally and individually shall live without tears forever as a reward for your ser¬ vices, but of an eternal Judge that respects in no whit your person, before whom and in whom you are quite open and perfectly known, who now and for all eternity sees your good and your evil, and esti¬ mates you with absolute justice? This blaze of in¬ finite light in which you stand, does it cheer you? If it does, then you are glad to learn that above all your struggles there is the eternal Victory, amid all your doubts there is the eternal Insight, and that your highest triumph, your highest conception, is just an atom of the infinite truth that all the time is there. But if all this is true of you, then you do love the ideal for its own sake. Then it is not your tri¬ umph that you seek, but the triumph of the Highest. And so it is that you rejoice to learn how this that is best in the world not only will triumph, but always has triumphed, since, as you now learn, for God the highest good is thus a matter of direct experience.”
The writer remembers well, how some years since, while all this doctrine seemed to him shrouded in 448 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY doubt, he heard a very thoughtful and pious friend maintain that the greatest comfort to be got from a belief in God is the sense that however much the world may misjudge us, however much even our best and closest friends may misunderstand us, there is one perfect all-knowing Thought that comprehends us far better than we comprehend ourselves. Good¬ ness is, in that thought, estimated at its full worth. Nothing is hidden from the Judge. And what we are, He knoweth it altogether. The present view seems to the author to meet the conditions that his friend here had in mind. Theism as a doctrine that there is a big power that fights and beats down other powers in the service of the good, is open to all the objections before suggested. This warrior, why does he not win? This slayer of evil things, this binder of Satan, who boasts that all things will yet be put under his feet, — has he not had all eternity in which to put all things under his feet, and has he done it yet? He may be indeed good, but some¬ how disaster seems to pursue him. Religious com¬ fort in contemplating him you can have if you be¬ lieve in him, but always you feel that this comfort is shadowed by the old doubt; is he after all what we want him to be, the victorious ruler of the world?
But if we leave the eternally doubtful contemplation of the world as a heap of powers, and come to the deeper truth of the world as Thought, then these doubts must disappear.
Yet to show that this is true, we must dwell upon doubts a little longer, and must compare our present view of the solution of the problem of evil with the views condemned in Chap. YIII.
THE RELIGIOUS INSIGHT III.
So far we have come in joyful contemplation of the Divine Truth. But now is there not a serpent in this Eden also? We have been talking of the in¬ finite goodness; but after all, what shall we still say of that finite “ partial evil” of life? We seem to have somehow proved a priori that it must be “ uni¬ versal good.” For, as we have said, in the Infinite Life of our ideal there can be no imperfection. This, we have said, is the demonstration that we missed all through our study of the world of the Powers. Since we approached that world from without, and never felt the pulse of its heart’s blood, we had noth¬ ing but doubt after doubt when we contemplated the evil that seemed to be in it. Our efforts to explain evil seemed hollow and worthless. There might be some deeper truth involved in these efforts; but we knew it not. Well, are we right in declaring that we have altogether overcome our difficulty now? Ap¬ parently we are as far as ever from seeing how the partial evil can be the universal good; we only show, from the conception of the infinite itself, that the partial evil must be the universal good. God must see how; and we know this because we know of God. More than this we seem to be unable to suggest.
But will this do? Have we not forgotten one ter¬ rible consequence of our doctrine? The partial evil is universal good, is it? There is no evil? All apparent imperfection is an illusion of our partial view? So then where is the chance to be in a free 450 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY way and of our own choice better than we otherwise in truth should be? Is not the arm that is raised to strike down wickedness paralyzed by the very thought that was to give it divine strength? This evil that I fight here in this finite world is a delu¬ sion. So then, why fight it? If I do good works, the world is infinitely good and perfect. If I seem to do evil works, the world is in truth no worse. Seeming good is not better than seeming evil, for if it were, then the seeming evil would be a real defect in God, in whose life is everything. If I have never loved aught but God, even so I have never hated aught but God. It is all alike. God does not need just me. Or rather I may say, in so far as he needs me to complete his infinite truth, he already has me from all eternity. I have nothing to do with the business, save to contemplate in dizzy indolence the whirling misty masses of seeming evil, and to say with a sort of amused reverence that they look very ill and opaque to me, but that of course God sees through them clearly enough somehow. The mist is in truth crystalline water, and he has so quick a sense as to look beyond the drops as easily as if they were in the calm unity of a mountain lake. And so, my religion is simply a contemplation of God’s wisdom, but otherwise an idle amusement.
So says the man who sees only this superficial view of our doctrine. In so far as, standing once more outside of some evil thing, we say: “ That thing yonder looks bad, but God must see it to be good,” we do indeed remain indolent, and our relig¬ ion simply means a sort of stoical indifference to the THE RELIGIOUS INSIGHT apparent distinction of good and evil. This is in fact the proper practical attitude of even the most earnest man in the presence of evil that he cannot understand and cannot affect. In such matters we must indeed be content with the passive knowledge. Death and the unavoidable pains of life, the down¬ fall of cherished plans, all the cruelty of fate, we must learn to look at as things to us opaque, but to God, who knows them fully, somehow clear and ra¬ tional. So regarding them, we must aim to get to the stage of stoical indifference about them. They are to us the accidents of existence. We have no business to murmur about them, since we see that God, experiencing them, somehow must experience them as elements in an absolutely perfect life. For God we regard not as the mysterious power who made them, and who then may have been limited to the use of imperfect means, but as the absolute thought that knows them; so that, however inexpli¬ cable they must now be to us, they are in themselves nothing that God vainly wishes to have otherwise, but they are organically joined with the rest of the glorious Whole.
Such is indeed the only present word for us finite minds about many of the shadows of seeming evil that we have to behold in the world of the appar¬ ently external facts. Such however is not the last word for us about the only evil that has any imme¬ diate moral significance, namely, the evil that we see, not as an external, shadowy mist, but as a present fact, experienced in us. Here it is that the objector just mentioned seems really formidable to us. But 452 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY just here it is that we find the answer to him. For in the world of our own acts we have a wondrous ex¬ perience. We realize evil, we fight it,, and, at the same time, we realize our fragment of the perfect divine life in the moment itself of struggling with the evil. And in this wondrous experience lies the whole solution of the ancient problem of the existence of moral evil. For instance, I find in myself a self¬ ish impulse, trying to destroy the moral insight. Now of this evil impulse I do not say, looking at it objectively: “ It is somehow a part of the universal good; ” but, in the moment of moral action I make it, even in the very moment of its sinfulness, a part of my good consciousness, in overcoming it. The moral insight condemns the evil that it experiences; and in condemning and conquering this evil it forms and is, together with the evil, the organic total that constitutes the good will. Only through this inner victory over the evil that is experienced as a con¬ quered tendency does the good will have its being. Now since the perfect life of God must have the ab¬ solutely good will, therefore it also must be conscious of such a victory. Thus the solution of our diffi¬ culty begins to appear. And thus we reap a new religious fruit from our ethical doctrine, to whose main principles we must once more here refer the reader.
When I experience the victory of the moral in- sight over the bad will, I experience in one indivis¬ ible moment both the partial evil of the selfish im¬ pulse (which in itself as a separate fact would be wholly bad) and the universal good of the1 moral THE RELIGIOUS INSIGHT victory, which has its existence only in the over¬ whelming of the evil. So, in the good act, I experi¬ ence the good as my evil lost in goodness, as a rebel¬ lion against the good conquered in the moment of its birth, as a peace that arises in the midst of this tri¬ umphant conflict, as a satisfaction that lives in this restless activity of inner warfare. This child of inner strife is the good, and the only moral good, we know.
What I here have present in me when I do a good act is an element of God’s life. I here directly ex¬ perience how the partial moral evil is universal good; for so it is a relatively universal good in me when, overcoming myself, I choose the universal will. The bad impulse is still in me, but is defeated. In the choice against evil is the very life of goodness, which would be a pale, stupid abstraction otherwise. Even so, to take another view, in the overcoming of our separateness as individuals lies, as we saw in the previous book, our sense of the worth of the univer¬ sal life. And what we here experience in the single moment of time, and in the narrowness of our finite lives, God must experience, and eternally. In our single good acts we have thus the specimen of the eternal realization of goodness.
But now how simple becomes the answer to that terrible suggestion of a moment since! How simple also the solution of the problem of evil! “ If I want to do evil, I cannot,” said the objector; u for God the perfect one includes me with the rest, and so cannot in his perfection be hurt by me. Let me do what I will, my act can only seem bad, and cannot be bad. All evil is illusion, hence there is no moral difference in action possible.”
454 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY “ Right indeed,” we answer, “ but also wrong, be¬ cause half the truth. The half kills, the whole gives life. Why canst thou not do any absolute evil? Be¬ cause thy evil intent, which, in its separateness, would be unmixed evil, thy selfish will, thy struggle against the moral insight, this evil will of thine is no lonesome fact in the world, but is an element in the organic life of God. In him, thy evil impulse forms part of a total good will, as the evil impulse of the good man forms an element in his realization of goodness. In God thy separateness is destroyed, and with it thy sin as evil. For good will in the in¬ finite is what the good man finds the good will to be in himself, namely, the organic total whose truth is the discovery of the evil. Therefore is God’s life perfect, because it includes not only the knowledge of thy finite wicked will, but the insight into its truth as a moment in the real universal will.
If then thou wert good, thou wouldst be good by including the evil impulse in a realization of its evil, and in an acceptance of the higher insight. If thou art evil, then in thyself, as separate being, thou art condemned, and just because thy separate evil is condemned, therefore is the total life of God, that includes thee with thy condemnation and with the triumph over thee, good.
This is the ground for the solution of the problem. To go more into detail: Evil is for us of two classes: the external seeming evil, such as death, pain, or weakness of character; and internal evil, namely the bad will itself. Because we know so little, there¬ fore we can neVer tell whether those externally seen THE RELIGIOUS INSIGHT seeming evils are blessings in disguise, or expressions of some wicked diabolical will-power at work about us. Somehow then, we never know exactly how, these seeming great evils must be in God universal good. But with regard to the only evil that we know as an inward experience, and so as a certain reality, namely, the Evil Will, we know both the existence of that, and its true relation to universal goodness, be¬ cause and only because we experience both of them first through the moral insight, and then in the good act. Goodness having its very life in the insight and in its exercise, has as its elements the evil im¬ pulse and its correction. The evil will as such may either be conquered in our personal experience, and then we are ourselves good; or it may be conquered not in our thought considered as a separate thought, but in the total thought to which ours is so related, as our single evil and good thoughts are related to the whole of us. The wicked man is no example of God’s delight in wickedness, just as the evil impulse that is an element in the good man’s goodness, and a very real element too, is no proof that the good man delights in evil. As the evil impulse is to the good man, so is the evil will of the wicked man to the life of God, in which he is an element. And just because the evil will is the only evil that we are sure of, this explanation is enough.
Thus the distinction between good and evil re¬ mains as clear as ever. Our difficulty about the matter is removed, not by any barren external the¬ odicy, such as were the forms of guess-work that we criticised in a previous chapter, but by a plain refl.ee- 456 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY tion on the moral experience itself. Goodness as a moral experience is for us the overcoming of experi¬ enced evil; and in the eternal life of God the reali¬ zation of goodness must have the same sort of or¬ ganic relation to evil as it has in us. Goodness is not mere innocence, but realized insight. To the wicked man we say: God is good because in think¬ ing thee he damns thy evil impulse and overwhelms it in a higher thought of which thou art a part. And in so far as thy will is truly evil, thou art in God just as the evil is in the good man; thou art known only to be condemned and overcome. That is thy blessed mission; and this mission of evil such as thine is indeed an eternal one. So that both things are true. The world is wholly good, and thou, such as thou individually art, mayest be damnably evil if so thou desirest.
We do not say then that evil must exist to set the good off by way of external contrast. That view we long since justly rejected. We say only that the evil will is a conquered element in the good will, and is as such necessary to goodness. Our conception of the absolute unity of God’s life, and that conception alone, enables us to apply this thought here. No form of dualistic Theism has any chance to apply this, the only satisfactory theodicy. If God were conceived as external to his creatures, as a power that made them beyond himself, the hopeless prob¬ lems and the unworthy subterfuges of the older the- odicies would come back to torment us. As it is, the solution of the problem of evil is given us in the directest and yet in the most unexpected way.'
THE RELIGIOUS INSIGHT Let us compare this solution with others. Evil, said one thought, before expounded, is an illusion of the partial view, as the shapelessness of the frag¬ ment of a statue is no disproof of the real beauty of the whole. W e replied in a previous chapter to this notion, by saying that evil seems so positive an ele¬ ment in the world as to make very hard this concep¬ tion of the partial evil as good universally in the aesthetic sense in which shapelessness of parts may coexist with a total beauty of the statue. For the fragment of the statue is merely an indifferent bit of stone without character. But the evil in the world seems in positive crying opposition to all goodness. Yet now, in the moral experience, we have found a wholly different relation of evil part to good whole. My good act is good just because of the evil that exists in it as conquered element. Without the evil moment actual in it, the total act could be at best innocent, not good. It is good by reason of its structure. That structure includes the evil will, but so includes it that the whole act is good. Even so, as we declare, God’s life includes, in the organic total of one conscious eternal instant, all life, and so all goodness and evil. To say that God is never¬ theless perfectly good is to say, not that God is innocent, knowing of no evil whatever, and includ¬ ing none; but that he so includes the evil will in the structure of his good will, as the good man, in one indivisible moment, includes his evil will in his good will; and that God is good only because he does so.
Again, to pass to another explanation, it has been 458 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY said that evil exists in the world as a means to good¬ ness. We objected to this that it puts the evil and the good first in separate beings, in separate acts or moments, and then makes the attainment of the good result dependent on the prior attainment of the sep¬ arate and independently present evil. Now all that explanation could only explain and justify the acts of a finite Power, which, not yet possessing a given good thing, seeks it through the mediation of some evil. In no wise can this explanation apply to God as infinite. He is no finite Power, nor does he make or get things external to himself. Hence he cannot be said to use means for the attainment of ends. But our explanation does not make evil a means to get the separate end, goodness. W e say that the con¬ nection is one of organic part with organic whole; that goodness has its life only in the instant of the discovery and inner overcoming of the evil will; and that therefore any life is good in which the evil will is present only as overcome, and so as lost in the good will. We appeal to the moral experience to il¬ lustrate how, when we do good, the evil will is pres¬ ent as a real fact in us, which yet does not make us as a whole bad, but just because it is present as an overcome element, is, even for that very reason, nec¬ essary to make us good. And we go on to say that even so in God the evil will of all who sin is pres¬ ent, a real fact in the Divine Life, no illusion in so far as one sees that it exists in God and nowhere else, but for that very reason an element, and a nec¬ essary element, in the total goodness of the.Univer¬ sal Will, which, realized in God, is related to the THE RELIGIOUS INSIGHT wills of the sinners as the wills of the good men are related to their evil impulses.
The explanation that evil is needed to contrast with goodness has already been mentioned.
Evil therefore, as a supposed real fact, separate from goodness, and a totally independent entity, is and must be an illusion. The objections to this view that we previously urged in Chapter VIII. were all applicable to the world of powers, which we viewed and had to view externally. God’s life, viewed internally, as philosophy must view it, is not subject to these criticisms. And the moral experi¬ ence has taught us how we are to explain the exist¬ ence of the only partial evil that we clearly know to be even a partial evil, namely, the evil will. The ex¬ planation is that the good act has its existence and life in the transcending of experienced present evil. This evil must not be an external evil, beyond the good will, but must be experienced in the same indi¬ visible moment in which it is transcended. That this wondrous union is possible, we simply find as fact in the moral experience. No genuine moral good¬ ness is possible save in the midst of such inner war¬ fare. The absence of the evil impulse leaves naught but innocence or instinct, morally insipid and color¬ less. Goodness is this organism of struggling ele¬ ments. Now, as we declare, in the infinite and united thought of God this unity of goodness is eternally present. God’s life is this infinite rest, not apart