of action which all the time is really
itself the End."

I looked up at him as he finished, to see whether he was quite
serious; and as he appeared to be so, and as Leslie still kept
silence, I took up the argument as follows.

"I understand," I said, "in a sort of way what you mean; but still the
same difficulty recurs which Audubon has already put forward. On
your hypothesis there seems to be an impassable gulf between God's
conception of Good and ours. To God, as it seems, the world is
eternally good; and in its goodness is included that illusion by which
it appears to us so bad, that we are continually employed in trying to
make it better. The maintenance of this illusion is essential to the
nature of the world; to us, evil always must appear. But, as we know
by experience, the evil that _appears_ is just as terrible and just
as hateful as it would be if it really _were_. A toothache, as Audubon
put it, is no less a pain to us because it is a pleasure to God. We
cannot, if we would, adopt His point of view; and clearly it would
be impious to try, since we should be endeavouring to defeat His
ingenious plan to keep the world going by hoodwinking us. We therefore
are chained and bound to the whirling wheel of appearance; to us what
seems good is good, and what seems bad, bad; and your contention that
all existence is somehow eternally good is for us simply irrelevant;
it belongs to the point of view of God to which we have no access."

"Yes," cried Audubon, "and what a God to call God at all! Why not
just as much the devil? What are we to think of the Being who is
responsible for a world of whose economy our evil is not merely
an accident, a mistake, but positively an essential, inseparable
condition!"

"What, indeed!" exclaimed Leslie. "Call Him God, by all means, if you
like, but such a God as Zeus was to Prometheus, omnipotent, indeed,
and able to exact with infallible precision His daily and hourly toll
of blood and tears, but powerless at least to chain the mind He has
created free, or to exact allegiance and homage from spirits greater,
though weaker, than Himself."

This was the sort of talk, I knew, that rather annoyed Dennis. I did
not therefore, for the moment, leave him time to reply, but proceeded
to a somewhat different point:

"Even putting aside," I said, "the moral character of God, as it
appears in your scheme of the universe, must we not perhaps accuse Him
of a slight lapse of intelligence? F