nt which prevents our standing up against the
temptations of the moment. And our ethical education is mainly directed
to making good this defect in our make up. But suppose that amount of
wisdom or strength had been an endowment of our nature from the outset,
is there any conceivable way in which we should have been the worse for
it? For even as it is there are some people who do make a fairly wise
and right choice, and whose high-water mark of excellence is not reached
through the crime and folly of the revival meeting convert. Are they the
worse because they have never yielded to evil? Is the naturally good man
really a less worthy character than the one whose comparative goodness
is only reached through and after a lengthy course of evil living? And
if not, in what way would the race have been worsened had we all been as
fortunately circumstanced? If it was really God's purpose to have a race
of men and women who should be both good and wise, it remains for the
theist to show in what way the plan would not have been as well served
by making them at once with a sufficiency of intelligence to act in the
real interests of themselves and of all around them.

Coming closer to earth the theist attempts to find a justification for
the existing order of things by finding a use for pain and suffering in
their educational influence on human nature, and in the impossibility of
altering for the better the consequences of natural law.

The real question at issue, says one of the most eloquent of modern
theists, the late Dr. Martineau, is "whether the laws of which complaint
is made work such harm that they ought never to have been enacted; or
whether, in spite of occasional disasters in their path, the sentient
existence of which they are the conditions has in its history a vast
excess of blessing." (Study of Religion II., p. 91.) And Canon Green,
who uses some of Dr. Martineau's ideas without the latter's eloquence or
power of reasoning, asks, "If God were to say, 'You condemn me for this
suffering! Well, take my creative power and re-create the world to
please yourself and to suit your own sense of justice and mercy'" could
we think out a world that should be better than this one? (Problem of
Evil, p. 48.)

Now both these methods of raising the question--and they are
representative of a whole group--serve but to confuse the issue. For no
one denies that some benefit may result from the present cosmical
structure. But that doe