vil and why the world is
as it is, we can understand something of the processes which are at work
for good or ill. We can in a measure trace whether these processes are
making slowly but surely for righteousness, or whether all the sin and
the suffering are aimless and purposeless, a voice that cries "believe
no more,"

"An ever breaking shore
That tumbles in a godless deep."

Now, I contend that the only ground of despair, the only thing that
might-shut us up to pessimism and to "a philosophy only just above
suicide mark," would be not the presence but the absence of these great
world evils. If this world presented a dead-level of comfortable
selfishness that on the whole answered fairly well all round, an economy
of petty self-interests in stable equilibrium, a world generally wrong,
but working out no evil in particular to set it right, a society in
which every man was for himself, and not the devil, as at present, but
God for us all--then indeed we might despair. But who can contemplate
humanity as it is, that broken stair of the Divinity, whose top is in
the unapproachable light of heaven and whose lowest step rests not on
earth but in hell, without feeling that it is destined for an infinite
progress, destined for the ascending feet of angels? Who that gazes on
this world, with its infinite depths of pain, its heavy weight of evil,
its abysmal falls, its stupendous pressures of wrong and misery, but
feels that here, if anywhere, we are in the presence of kinetic
energies, of immense moral and spiritual forces, capable of raising the
whole of fallen humanity to the heights of the Divine. For let us
remember that in the moral and spiritual world, as well as in the
physical, no fall but carries with it the force that can be converted
into a rise; no dread resistance of wrong to the right but creates an
accumulated force which once let loose can transform an empire; no
weight of evil but, in pulling it down, can be made to raise the whole
bent of our life.

"Man partly is, and wholly hopes to be."

He is "no finite and finished clod." Progress, as Browning says, is his
distinctive mark, and these deep evils are the gigantic steps by which
he rises as he treads them under foot. Once recognize the fact that he
is a fallen being--and by that I mean no theological dogma, but a truth
of life, which, whatever our creed may be, must stare us in the
face--the fact that he is a being knowing good but choosi