ver perish. It completes itself in becoming
infinite, but it cannot be destroyed.

CHAPTER IV

THE NATURE OF EVIL

+The problem not insoluble.+--Before going on to say more about human
personality, especially the personality of Jesus, it is requisite that
we should determine our attitude toward a great question which in
manifold forms has beset the human intellect ever since the dawn of
history, namely, the problem of evil. It is still the fashion to
declare this problem insoluble, but I have the audacity to believe that
it is not so; mystery there may be, but it is not chiefly mystery. I
will even go so far as to assert that the problem had been solved in
human thought before Christianity began. What I have to say about it
now is ancient thinking confirmed by present-day experience.

Evil is a negative, not a positive term. It denotes the absence rather
than the presence of something. It is the perceived privation of good,
the shadow where the light ought to be. "The devil is a vacuum," as a
friend of mine once remarked to the no small bewilderment of a group of
listeners in whose imagination the devil was anything but a vacuum.
Evil is not an intruder in an otherwise perfect universe; finiteness
presumes it. A thing is only seen to be evil when the capacity for
good is present and unsatisfied. Evil is not a principle at war with
good. Good is being and evil is not-being. When consciousness of
being seeks further expression and finds itself hindered by its
limitations, it becomes aware of evil.

A little reflection ought to convince anyone that this is the true way
to look at the question of evil. Instead of asking how evil came to be
in the universe, we should recognise that nothing finite can exist
without it. Infinity alone can know nothing of evil because its
resources are illimitable and--if I may be permitted the
expression--every need is supplied before it can be felt. Evil and
good are not like two armies in deadly conflict with each other for the
possession of the city of God. We ought not to say that when one is in
the other is out, but rather when one _is_ the other is _not_. The
very word "good" implies evil. One is positive and the other negative.
Good only emerges in our experience in contrast with evil, and the
ideal existence must be that in which good and evil are both
transcended in the life eternal, when struggle and conflict are no
more. In our present state of existenc