d
with its corresponding regress, which indicates at once the voyage
outwards and the voyage inwards, as the briefest of expressions for what
is technically called '_course of post,' i.e._, the reciprocation of
post, its systole and diastole.

[28] Wordsworth.

_XX. THE PRINCIPLE OF EVIL._

We are not to suppose the rebel, or, more properly, corrupted
angels--the rebellion being in the result, not in the intention (which
is as little conceivable in an exalted spirit as that man should prepare
to make war on gravitation)--were essentially evil. Whether a principle
of evil--essential evil--anywhere exists can only be guessed. So gloomy
an idea is shut up from man. Yet, if so, possibly the angels and man
were nearing it continually.

Possibly after a certain approach to that Maelstrom recall might be
hopeless. Possibly many anchors had been thrown out to pick up, had
all dragged, and last of all came to the Jewish trial. (Of course,
under the Pagan absence of sin, _a fall was impossible_. A return was
impossible, in the sense that you cannot return to a place which you
have never left. Have I ever noticed this?) We are not to suppose that
the angels were really in a state of rebellion. So far from that, it
was evidently amongst the purposes of God that what are called false
Gods, and are so in the ultimate sense of resting on tainted
principles and tending to ruin--perhaps irretrievable (though it would
be the same thing practically if no restoration were possible but
through vast aeons of unhappy incarnations)--but otherwise were as
real as anything can be into whose nature a germ of evil has entered,
should effect a secondary ministration of the last importance to man's
welfare. Doubt there can be little that without any religion, any
sense of dependency, or gratitude, or reverence as to superior
natures, man would rapidly have deteriorated; and that would have
tended to such destruction of all nobler principles--patriotism
(strong in the old world as with us), humanity, ties of parentage or
neighbourhood--as would soon have thinned the world; so that the
Jewish process thus going on must have failed for want of
correspondencies to the scheme--possibly endless oscillations which,
however coincident with plagues, would extirpate the human race. We
may see in manufacturing neighbourhoods, so long as no dependency
exists on masters, where wages show that not work, but workmen, are
scarce, how unamiable, insole