e evil is necessary in order
that we may know that there is such a thing as good, and therefore that
we may realise the true nature of the life eternal. Look at that
shadow on the pavement cast by the row of houses between your vision
and the rising sun. Until the sun made his presence felt, you did not
even know there was a shadow. Presently as the light giver climbs
beyond and above this temporary barrier you will watch the shadow
shrink and disappear. Where has it gone? If it were an entity in
itself, it would have moved off somewhere else, but you are well aware
that it has not done so, for it never had any real existence; real as
it seemed, so real that you were able to give it a name, it never did
more than show the place that needed to be filled with light. When the
light came the shadow was swallowed up. So it is with every kind of
evil, no matter what. Your perception of evil is the concomitant of
your expanding finite consciousness of good. The moment you see a
thing to be wrong you have affirmed that you know, however vaguely,
what is required to put it right. Even when evil comes in the form of
a calamity that lessens and diminishes your previous experience of
good, as in an earthquake or a pestilence, this statement as to its
true nature is in no way invalidated. It is not a thing in itself, it
is only the perceived privation of what you know to be good, and which
you know to be good because of the very presence of limitation,
hindrance, and imperfection.

+The relation of evil and pain.+--But to most minds evil is almost
synonymous with pain, at any rate in our experience it is associated
with pain. When men begin questioning the goodness of God because of
the evil of the world, they usually mean the pain of the world.
Perhaps their thought about sin is to some extent an exception; sin and
pain are not necessarily immediately associated in the theological
mind. But what is pain? Properly speaking it is not in itself evil,
but rather the evidence of evil, and also in a different way the
evidence of good. Pain is life asserting itself against death, the
higher struggling with the lower, the true with the false, the real
with the unreal. When a baby cries for food he does so in unconscious
obedience to the law of life; a stone does not cry for food. When a
strong man suffers in the grip of a fell disease, the life within him
is fighting for expression against something that seems to be
extin