demons work havoc, while favorable spirits bring
blessings to the needy worshiper.

But, as religion developed a more distinctly ethical and personal
character, the existence of evil in the world became a problem. In the
early days, it was not so much a problem as a fact. But a Jew who
believed that Yahweh controlled everything that occurred in the Kingdom
had to account for personal and social disasters in a rational way.
What was more natural than the hypothesis that those whom disasters
overtook had been guilty of some secret wrong? And it was this point
of view which was adopted. The Book of Job represents the puzzled
reflection of a late period over the difficulty of squaring the
hypothesis with the facts. And, so far as I can see, the puzzle is
handled as well as it could be within the accepted setting. The whole
treatment is deductive rather than inductive. Assume an omnipotent,
omniscient and ethically perfect deity, and it follows that, when facts
do not square with your sense of justice, you must either suspect the
individual of secret sins or proclaim that God's ways are past finding
out. In other words, the search for a theodicy leads to agnosticism.
Since you don't really know anything about the world, one hypothesis is
as good as {155} another. But agnosticism is a cheap way of
establishing a position, and is likely to suggest to the reflective
that the whole setting of theodicy is at fault. If the religious view
of the world leads to this _impasse_, may it not be better to take a
more inductive way of approach to what we call evil? May not reality
be of such a character that evil is as natural as good?

When we glance a little more closely at the Christian tradition, we
find that the popular answer to the problem of evil is by no means
unambiguous. To explain the existence of evil by the agency of the
devil (Satan, Ahriman) is a straightforward answer, quite in accordance
with the appeal to personal agency so characteristic of religion, but
it does not harmonize with the ethical monotheism which Christianity
inherited. The query will not down, Why does this omnipotent and
ethically perfect deity permit such a being to exist to work havoc
amongst his children? Even upon a casual examination, it becomes
evident that there are many strands of tradition and doctrine in
Christianity. There is the classic monotheism of the prophets, and the
more polytheistic tendencies of later times, a contras