but in moral or spiritual perfection. If God were indifferent to the
evil of the world, acquiesced in it without reason, and let it ripen
into all manner of wretchedness, then man, in condemning the world,
though without power to remove the least of its miseries, would be
higher than God. But we have still to account for the possibility of
man's assuming an attitude implied in the consciousness that, while he
is without power, God is without pity, and in the despair which springs
from his hate of evil. How comes it that human nature rises above its
origin, and is able--nay, obliged--to condemn the evil which God
permits? Is man finite in power, a mere implement of a mocking will so
far as knowledge goes, the plaything of remorseless forces, and yet
author and first source of something in himself which invests him with a
dignity that God Himself cannot share? Is the moral consciousness which,
by its very nature, must bear witness against the Power, although it
cannot arrest its pitiless course, or remove the least evil,

"Man's own work, his birth of heart and brain,
His native grace, no alien gift at all?"

We are thus caught between the horns of a final dilemma. Either the pity
and love, which make man revolt against all suffering, are man's own
creation; or else God, who made man's heart to love, has given to man
something higher than He owns Himself. But both of these alternatives
are impossible.

"Here's the touch that breaks the bubble."

The first alternative is impossible, because man is by definition
powerless, a mere link in the endless chain of causes, incapable of
changing the least part of the scheme of things which he condemns, and
therefore much more unable to initiate, or to bring into a loveless
world abandoned to blind power, the noble might of love.

"Will of man create?
No more than this my hand, which strewed the beans
Produced them also from its finger-tips."[A]

[Footnote A: _A Bean-Stripe_.]

All that man is and has is a mere loan; his love no less than his finite
intellect and limited power, has had its origin elsewhere.

"Back goes creation to its source, source prime
And ultimate, the single and the sole."[B]

[Footnote B: _Ibid_.]

The argument ends by bringing us back

"To the starting-point,--
Man's impotency, God's omnipotence,
These stop my answer."[A]

[Footnote A: _A Bean-Stripe_.]

I shall not pause at present to examine the value of t