.

Where, then, is the hope to be found? It is here. One is tempted to
think of God through human analogies and symbols. We think of Him as of
a potter moulding the clay to his will; as of a statesman that sways a
state; as of an artist that traces a fair design. But all similitudes
and comparisons break down, for no man can create anything; he can but
modify matter to his ends, and when he fails, it is because of some
natural law that cuts across his design and thwarts him relentlessly.
But the essence of God's omnipotence is that both law and matter are His
and originate from Him; so that, if a single fibre of what we know to be
evil can be found in the world, either God is responsible for that, or
He is dealing with something He did not originate and cannot overcome.
Nothing can extricate us from this dilemma, except the belief that what
we think evil is not really evil at all, but hidden good; and thus we
have firm ground under our feet at last, and can begin to climb out of
the abyss. And then we feel in our own hearts how indomitable is our
sense of our right to happiness, how unconquerable our hope; how swiftly
we forget unhappiness; how firmly we remember joy; and then we see that
the one absolutely permanent and vital power in the world is the power
of love, which wins victories over every evil we can name; and if it
is so plain that love is the one essential and triumphant force in the
world, it must be the very heartbeat of God; till we feel that when soon
or late the day comes for us, when our swimming eyes discern ever more
faintly the awestruck pitying faces round us, and the senses give up
their powers one by one, and the tides of death creep on us, and the
daylight dies--that even so we shall find that love awaiting us in
the region to which the noblest and bravest and purest, as well as the
vilest and most timid and most soiled have gone.

This, then, is the only optimism that is worth the name; not the feeble
optimism that brushes away the darker side of life impatiently and
fretfully, but the optimism that dares to look boldly into the fiercest
miseries of the human spirit, and to come back, as Perseus came, pale
and smoke-stained, from the dim underworld, and say that there is yet
hope brightening on the verge of the gloom.

What one desires, then, is an optimism which arises from taking a wide
view of things as they are, and taking the worst side into account,
not an optimism which is only made po