actical. But, apart from all the
other objections to this, which we have already been considering in such
detail, it will very soon be apparent that it involves the very same
inconsistency, the same contradiction in terms. The fact of moral evil
still confronts us, and the humanity to which we lift our hearts up is
still taxable with that. But perhaps we separate the good in humanity
from the evil, and only worship the former as struggling to get free
from the latter. This, however, will be of little help to us. If what we
call humanity is nothing but the good part of it, we can only vindicate
its goodness at the expense of its strength. Evil is at least an equal
match for it, and in most of the battles hitherto it is evil that has
been victorious. But to conceive of good in this way is really to
destroy our conception of it. Goodness is in itself an incomplete
notion; it is but one facet of a figure which, approached from other
sides, appears to us as eternity, as omnipresence, and, above all, as
supreme strength; and to reduce goodness to nothing but the higher part
of humanity--to make it a wavering fitful flame that continually sinks
and flickers, that at its best can but blaze for a while, and at its
brightest can throw no light beyond this paltry parish of a world--is to
deprive it of its whole meaning and hold on us. Or again, even were this
not so, and could we believe, and be strengthened by believing, that the
good in humanity would one day gain the victory, and that some higher
future, which even we might partake in by preparing, was in store for
the human race, would our conception of the matter then be any more
harmonious? As we surveyed our race as a whole, would its brighter
future ever do away with its past? Would not the depth and the darkness
of the shadow grow more portentous as the light grew brighter? And would
not man's history strike more clearly on us as the ghastly embodiment of
a vast injustice? But it may be said that the sorrows of the past will
hereafter be dead and done with; that evil will literally be as though
it had never been. Well, and so in a short time will the good likewise;
and if we are ever to think lightly of the world's sinful and sorrowful
past, we shall have to think equally lightly of its sinless and cheerful
future.

Let us pass now to the secondary points. Opponents of theism, or of
religion in general, are perpetually attacking it for its theories of a
future life. Its e