;
The world is what it is, for all our dust and din.

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"Is it so small a thing
To have enjoy'd the sun,
To have lived light in the spring,
To have loved, to have thought, to have done;
To have advanced true friends, and beat down baffling foes--"

Let those who can meet life bravely and joyously. The stage has been
planned by no master artist, and the actors are only amateurs compelled
to improvise their parts; but the sunlight is sometimes golden and the
spoken lines often surprise us with their beauty. What critic can pass
assured judgment upon this continuous play?

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CHAPTER XII

THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

It is noteworthy that there has never been a problem of good, but
always a problem of evil. Man takes the good in his life for granted,
while he bewails the presence of evil in all its forms. The Greeks had
the myth of Pandora's box to account for the sorrows and ills which
afflict the human race; the Hebrews told of the Fall of man from his
original state of bliss to a life of toil and sin through the weakness
of our first parents and the wiles of the Serpent; the Scandinavians
sang of Loki, the Spirit of Deception, whose artful malice led to the
death of Balder, the Beautiful. And Christianity has been accustomed
to connect evil with a personal devil "who rushes about like a roaring
lion seeking whom he may devour." At his door, popular thought has
lain those temptations and backslidings that bewilder poor humanity.
Even the more physical evils, such as famine, sickness and bodily
injury, have been ascribed to his agency.

Is it necessary to say that primitive man thought of all evils as due
to mysterious potencies which surrounded him on every hand? His ritual
of purification corresponds to the signs which now surround electrical
machinery. Irrational as many of these taboos were, they yet implied
that the actual world was a strange mixture of favorable and
unfavorable potencies to {154} which man had to adapt himself. "To the
primitive mind nothing was more uncanny than blood, and there are
people still who faint at the sight of it: for 'the blood is the life,'
life and death are the great primeval mysteries, and all the physical
substances that are associated with the inner principle of either
partake of this mysteriousness." This early idea of a miasmic
contagion slowly unites itself with the belief in demons, as animistic
religion evolves. Bad