ts way West and appears in
Manicheism. It may not be well known, but it was this Manichean
conception of the world that Saint Augustine gave up at his conversion
to Christianity. Again and again, it found its way to the surface of
Western society. Who has not heard of the Cathars or Albigenses of the
Middle Ages? These people were believers in a struggling deity engaged
with the powers of evil. Some of them identified the Jehovah of the
Old Testament with this cruel {163} and malignant spirit. In so doing,
they showed an absence of all historical perspective, but, also, a keen
ethical judgment. This tribal god of the early Jews did not harmonize
with their ideals of goodness and mercy. While theirs was a darker and
more superstitious outlook than an educated man of to-day would adopt,
the logical basis of the system is essentially the same as the one
which seems to be rising to the surface in our own times as a revolt
against the smugness of traditional Christianity. The atmosphere of
religion was more somber in the past; and these Cathars would have been
shocked by the fine, careless rapture of the modern novelist; but they
would have recognized that his view was akin to their own.

It may not be amiss to mention the fact that John Stuart Mill, the
famous English philosopher of the middle of the nineteenth century,
suggested that it would be truer to the experience of human beings to
assume a God limited in power, though perfect in other respects. It is
impossible, he thought, to harmonize the attributes of omnipotence and
goodness in a divine agent, with the world as it is. This protest
against the high, deductive faith of Christian monotheism was due to
Mill's frank empiricism. Life must speak for itself, he held; it must
justify hypotheses by their agreement with it. The traditional
Christian method has been too dictatorial and too little inductive. It
has started from a set of dogmas in regard to God and spun out their
consequences, refusing to qualify these dogmas when the consequences
did not fit the tragic character of life.

The treatment of the second logical possibility is familiar ground.
Christian ethical monotheism followed {164} Hebrew religious thought in
its essentials. God is held to be an omnipotent agent who is also
morally perfect. Theology knows two forms of this dogma, the
Calvinistic or Augustinian, and the Arminian. Calvinism stands flatly
on the thesis that God is just and tha