is not all. The value of all higher goods even
in this life, though it does not depend wholly upon their duration,
does partly depend upon it. It would be better to be pure and
unselfish for a day than to be base and selfish for a century. And yet
we do not hesitate to commend the value of intellectual and of all
kinds of higher enjoyments on account of their greater durability.
Why, then, should we shrink from admitting that the value of character
really is increased when it is regarded as surviving bodily death?
Disbelief in Immortality would, I believe, in the long run and for the
vast majority of men, carry with it an enormous enhancement of the
value of the carnal and sensual over the spiritual and intellectual
element in life.

(3) A third consequence which follows from our determining to accept
the moral consciousness as containing the supreme revelation of God is
this. From the point of view of the moral consciousness {80} we cannot
say that the Universe is wholly good. We have only one means of
judging whether things are good or bad: the idea of value is wholly
derived from our own ethical judgements or judgements of value. If we
distrust these judgements, there is no higher court to which we can
appeal. And if we distrust our most ultimate judgements of value, I do
not know why we should trust any judgements whatever. Even if we grant
that from some very transcendental metaphysical height--the height, for
instance, of Mr. Bradley's Philosophy--it may be contended that none of
our judgements are wholly true or fully adequate to express the true
nature of Reality, we at all events cannot get nearer to Reality than
we are conducted by the judgements which present themselves to us as
immediate and self-evident. Now, if we do apply these judgements of
value to the Universe as we know it, can we say that everything in it
seems to be very good? For my own part, I unhesitatingly say, 'Pain is
an evil, and sin is a worse evil, and nothing on earth can ever make
them good.' How then are we to account for such evils in a Universe
which we believe to express the thought and will of a perfectly
righteous Being? In only one way that I know of--by supposing they are
means to a greater good. That is really the substance and substratum
of all the Theodicies of all the Philosophers and all the {81}
Theologians except those who frankly trample on or throw over the Moral
Consciousness, and declare that, for those wh