rt of wisdom to discriminate between them
in theory.

The Manicheans accordingly attributed what is good in the world to one
power and what is bad to another. The fable is transparent enough, and
we, who have only just learned to smile at a personal devil, may affect
to wonder that any one should ever have taken it literally. But in an
age when the assertive imagination was unchecked by any critical sense,
such a device at least avoided the scandal of attributing all the evils
and sins of this world to a principle essentially inviolate and pure. By
avoiding what must have seemed a blasphemy to Saint Augustine, as to
every one whose speculation was still relevant to his conscience and to
his practical idealism, the Manicheans thus prevailed on many to
overlook the contradictions which their system developed so soon as its
figments were projected into the sphere of absolute existences.

[Sidenote: All things good by nature.]

The horror with which an idealistic youth at first views the truculence
of nature and the turpitude of worldly life is capable of being softened
by experience. Time subdues our initial preferences by showing us the
complexity of moral relations in this world, and by extending our
imaginative sympathy to forms of existence and passion at first
repulsive, which from new and ultra-personal points of view may have
their natural sweetness and value. In this way, Saint Augustine was
ultimately brought to appreciate the catholicity and scope of those
Greek sages who had taught that all being was to itself good, that evil
was but the impediment of natural function, and that therefore the
conception of anything totally or essentially evil was only a petulance
or exaggeration in moral judgment that took, as it were, the bit in its
teeth, and turned an incidental conflict of interests into a
metaphysical opposition of natures. All definite being is in itself
congruous with the true and the good, since its constitution is
intelligible and its operation is creative of values. Were it not for
the limitations of matter and the accidental crowding and conflict of
life, all existing natures might subsist and prosper in peace and
concord, just as their various ideas live without contradiction in the
realm of conceptual truth. We may say of all things, in the words of the
Gospel, that their angels see the face of God. Their ideals are no less
cases of the good, no less instances of perfection, than is the ideal
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