t to be safe
from, _Te deums_ are sung for those that were saved and _Requiems_ for
those that perished. God's office, in both cases, is to save only. No
one seriously imagines that Providence does more than _govern_--that is,
watch over and incidentally modify the natural course of affairs--not
even in the other world, if fortunes are still changeable there.

[Sidenote: Need of an opposing principle.]

The criterion of divine activity could not be placed more squarely and
unequivocally in the good. Plato and Aristotle are not in this respect
better moralists than is an unsophisticated piety. God is the ideal, and
what manifests the ideal manifests God. Are you confident of the
permanence and triumph of the things you prize? Then you trust in God,
you live in the consciousness of his presence. The proof and measure of
rationality in the world, and of God's power over it, is the extent of
human satisfactions. In hell, good people would disbelieve in God, and
it is impious of the trembling devils to believe in him there. The
existence of any evil--and if evil is felt it exists, for experience is
its locus--is a proof that some accident has intruded into God's works.
If that loyalty to the good, which is the prerequisite of rationality,
is to remain standing, we must admit into the world, while it contains
anything practically evil, a principle, however minimised, which is not
rational. This irrational principle may be inertia in matter, accidental
perversity in the will, or ultimate conflict of interests. Somehow an
element of resistance to the rational order must be introduced
somewhere. And immediately, in order to distinguish the part furnished
by reason from its irrational alloy, we must find some practical test;
for if we are to show that there is a great and triumphant rationality
in the world, in spite of irrational accidents and brute opposition, we
must frame an idea of rationality different from that of being. It will
no longer do to say, with the optimists, the rational is the real, the
real is the rational. For we wish to make a distinction, in order to
maintain our loyalty to the good, and not to eviscerate the idea of
reason by emptying it of its essential meaning, which is action
addressed to the good and thought envisaging the ideal. To pious
feeling, the free-will of creatures, their power, active or passive, of
independent origination, is the explanation of all defects; and
everything which is not helpf