mong the people who never have conceived
God as either perfectly good or entirely omnipotent, at least among the
theologians. If not all felt the contradiction with equal acuteness, the
reason doubtless was that a large part of their thought was perfunctory
and merely apologetic: they did not quite mean what they said when they
spoke of perfect goodness; and we shall see how Saint Augustine himself,
when reduced to extremities, surrendered his loyalty to the moral ideal
rather than reconsider his traditional premisses.

[Sidenote: The Manicheans.]

How tenaciously, however, he clung to the moral in the religious, we can
see by the difficulty he had in separating himself from the Manicheans.
The Manicheans admitted two absolutes, the essence of the one being
goodness and of the other badness. This system was logically weak,
because these absolutes were in the first place two, which is one
contradiction, and in the second place relative, which is another. But
in spite of the pitfalls into which the Manicheans were betrayed by
their pursuit of metaphysical absolutes, they were supported by a moral
intuition of great truth and importance. They saw that an essentially
good principle could not have essential evil for its effect. These moral
terms are, we may ourselves feel sure, relative to existence and to
actual impulse, and it may accordingly be always misleading to make them
the essence of metaphysical realities: good and bad may be not
existences but qualities which existences have only in relation to
demands in themselves or in one another. Yet if we once launch, as many
metaphysicians would have us do, into the hypostasis of qualities and
relations, it is certainly better and more honest to make contradictory
qualities into opposed entities, and not to render our metaphysical
world unmeaning as well as fictitious by peopling it with concepts in
which the most important categories of life are submerged and
invalidated. Evil may be no more a metaphysical existence than good is;
both are undoubtedly mere terms for vital utilities and impediments; but
if we are to indulge in mythology at all, it is better that our
mythology should do symbolic justice to experience and should represent
by contrasted figures the ineradicable practical difference between the
better and the worse, the beautiful and the ugly, the trustworthy and
the fallacious. To discriminate between these things in practice is
wisdom, and it should be the pa