which the good did not very greatly predominate over the evil. More
than that I do not think we are entitled to say. And yet Justice is so
great a good that it is rational to hope that for every individual
conscious being--at least each individual capable of any high degree of
good--there must be a predominance of good on the whole. Beings of
very small capacity might conceivably be created chiefly or entirely as
a means to a vastly greater good than any that they {85} themselves
enjoy: the higher a spirit is in the scale of being, the more difficult
it becomes to suppose that it has been brought into existence merely as
a means to another's good, or that it will not ultimately enjoy a good
which will make it on the whole good that it should have been born.

I could wish myself that, in popular religious teaching, there was a
franker conception of this position--a position which, as I have said,
is really implied in the Theodicies of all the Divines. Popular
unbelief--and sometimes the unbelief of more cultivated persons--rests
mainly upon the existence of evil. We should cut at the roots of it by
teaching frankly that this is the best of all possible Universes,
though not the best of all imaginable Universes--such Universes as we
can construct in our own imagination by picturing to ourselves all the
good that there is in the world without any of the evil. We may still
say, if we please, that God is infinite because He is limited by
nothing outside His own nature, except what He has Himself caused. We
can still call Him Omnipotent in the sense that He possesses all the
power there is. And in many ways such a belief is far more practically
consolatory and stimulating than a belief in a God who can do all
things by any means and who consequently does not need our help. In
our view, we are engaged not in a sham warfare with an evil that is
really {86} good, but in a real warfare with a real evil, a struggle in
which we have the ultimate power in the Universe on our side, but one
in which the victory cannot be won without our help, a real struggle in
which we are called upon to be literally fellow-workers with God.

LITERATURE

The subject is more or less explicitly dealt with in most of the works
mentioned at the end of the last two lectures, and also in books on
Moral Philosophy too numerous to mention. Classical vindications of
the authority of the Moral Consciousness are Bishop Butler's _Sermons_,
and Kan