etter forgotten, all the
horrible emphasis on sin and its consequences introduced into the
sunny teaching of Jesus by Paul of Tarsus, and alien to it? Before
we answer this question in any direct way, it is worth while to
realize for how many of the real thinkers, and the great teachers of
mankind, this distinction between good and evil has been
fundamental. They have not invented it as a theory on which to base
religion, but they have found it in human life, one and all of them.
If Walt Whitman or Swami Vivekananda overlook the difference between
virtue and vice, and do honour to the courtesan, it simply means
that they are bad thinkers, bad observers. The deeper minds see more
clearly and escape the confusion into which the slight and quick,
the sentimental, hurl themselves. Above all, when God in any degree
grows real to a man, when a man seriously gives himself not to some
mere vague "contemplation" of God but to the earnest study of God's
ways in human affairs, and of God's laws and their working, the
great contrasts in men's responses to God's rule become luminous.

When God matters to a man, all life shows the result. Good and bad,
right and wrong stand out clear as the contrast between light and
darkness--they cannot be mistaken, and they matter--and matter for
ever. They are no concern of a moment. Action makes character; and,
until the action is undone again, the effect on character is not
undone. Right and wrong are of eternal significance now in virtue of
the reality of God.

Gautama Buddha, for instance, and the greater Hindu thinkers, in
their doctrine of Karma, have taught a significance inherent in good
and evil, which we can only not call boundless. Buddha did this
without any great consciousness of God; and many Indian thinkers
have so emphasized the doctrine that it has taken all the stress
laid on "Bhakti" by Ramanuja and others to restore to life a
perspective or a balance, however it should be described, that will
save men from utter despair. Nor is it Eastern thinkers only who
have taught men the reality of heaven and hell. The poetry of
Aeschylus is full of his great realization of the nexus between act
and outcome. With all the humour and charm there is in Plato, we
cannot escape his tremendous teaching on the age-long consequences
of good and evil in a cosmos ordered by God. Carlyle, in our own
days, realized the same thing--he learnt it no doubt from his
mother; and learnt it again in Londo