remor that intrudes
When firmest seems my faith in white."[C]

[Footnote C: _Ibid_.]

The intellectual insight that would penetrate through the vari-colour of
events into the actual presence of the incandescent white of love, which
glows, as hope tells us, in all things, would stultify itself, and lose
its knowledge even of the good.

"Think!
Could I see plain, be somehow certified
All was illusion--evil far and wide
Was good disguised,--why, out with one huge wipe
Goes knowledge from me. Type needs antitype:
As night needs day, as shine needs shade, so good
Needs evil: how were pity understood
Unless by pain? "[A]

[Footnote A: _Francis Furini_.]

Good and evil are relative to each other, and each is known only through
its contrary.

"For me
(Patience, beseech you!) Knowledge can but be
Of good by knowledge of good's opposite--
Evil."[B]

[Footnote B: _Ibid_.]

The extinction of one of the terms would be the extinction of the other.
And, in a similar manner, clear knowledge that evil is illusion and that
all things have their place in an infinite divine order would paralyze
all moral effort, as well as stultify itself.

"Make evident that pain
Permissibly masks pleasure--you abstain
From out-stretch of the finger-tip that saves
A drowning fly."[C]

[Footnote C: _Ibid_.]

Certainty on either side, either that evil is evil for evermore,
irredeemable and absolute, a drench of utter dark not illuminable by
white; or that it is but mere show and semblance, which the good takes
upon itself, would alike be ruinous to man. For both alternatives would
render all striving folly. The right attitude for man is that of
ignorance, complete uncertainty, the equipoise of conflicting
alternatives. He must take his stand on the contradiction. Hope he may
have that all things work together for good. It is right that he should
nourish the faith that the antagonism of evil with good in the world is
only an illusion; but that faith must stop short of the complete
conviction that knowledge would bring. When, therefore, the hypothesis
of universal love is confronted with the evils of life, and we ask how
it can be maintained in the face of the manifold miseries everywhere
apparent, the poet answers, "You do not know, and cannot know, whether
they are evils or not. Your knowledge remains at the surface of things.
You