ns of imports
to exports, the periods of depression and recovery, and in close
connection with all this the ever-changing conditions of the lives of
countless workmen throughout the world, their well-being or ill-being,
it may be their very life and death, together with the whole fate
of future generations in health, capacity, opportunity, and the
like,--all this complexus of things, so chaotic and unintelligible at
the first view, so full, as we say, of iniquity, injustice, and the
like, falls, as we penetrate further, into one vast and harmonious
system, so inspiring to the imagination, so inevitable to the
understanding, that our objections and cavillings, ethical, aesthetic,
or what you will, simply vanish away at the clearer vision, or, if
they persist, persist as mere irrelevant illusions; while we
abandon ourselves to the contemplation of the whole, as of some
world-symphony, whose dissonances, no less than its concords, are
taken up and resolved in the irresistible march and progress, the
ocean-flooding of the Whole. You will think," he continued, "that I am
absurdly rhapsodical over what, after all, is matter prosaic enough;
but what I wanted to suggest was that it is Reality so conceived that
appeals to me at once as Truth and as Good. This partial vision of
mine in the economic sphere is a kind of type of the way in which
I conceive the Absolute. I conceive Him to be a Being necessary and
therefore perfect; a Being in face of whom our own incoherent and
tentative criticisms, our complaints that this or that should, if only
it could, be otherwise, our regrets, desires, aspirations, and
the like, shew but as so many testimonies to our own essential
imperfection, weaknesses to be surmounted, rather than signs of worth
to stamp us, as we vainly boast, the elect of creation."

He finished; and I half expected that Leslie would intervene, since
I saw, as I thought, many weak points in the position. But he kept
silence, impressed, perhaps, by that idea of the Perfect and Eternal
which has a natural home in the minds of the generous and the young.
So I began myself rather tentatively:

"I think," I said, "I understand the position you wish to indicate;
and so stated, in general terms, no doubt it is attractive. It is when
we endeavour to work it out in detail that the difficulties appear.
The position, as I understand it, is, that, from the point of view of
the Absolute, what we call Evil and what we call Good simp