was afterward to
regard as the obvious, if not wholly reconcilable, attributes of the
deity. The mystery could not then be recognised; it had to be made. And
Saint Augustine, with his vital religion, with his spontaneous adoration
of God the ideal, could not attribute to that ideal unimpeded efficacy
in the world. To admit that all natures were essentially good might
dispel the Manichean fancy about an Evil Absolute engaged in single
combat with an Absolute Good; but insight into the meaning and the
natural conditions of evil could only make its presence more obvious and
its origin more intimately bound up with the general constitution of the
world. Evil is only imperfection; but everything is imperfect. Conflict
is only maladaptation, but there is maladaptation everywhere. If we
assume, then, what the doctrine of creation requires, that all things at
first proceeded out of the potency of the good--their matter and form,
their distribution and their energies, being wholly attributable to the
attraction of the ultimately best--it is clear that some calamity must
have immediately supervened by which the fountains of life were defiled,
the strength of the ideal principle in living things weakened, and the
mortal conflict instituted which not only condemns all existent things
ultimately to perish, but hardly allows them, even while they painfully
endure, to be truly and adequately themselves.

Original sin, with the fall of the angels and of man for its mythical
ground, thus enters into the inmost web of Augustinian philosophy. This
fact cannot be too much insisted upon, for only by the immediate
introduction of original sin into the history of the world could a man
to whom God was still a moral term believe at all in the natural and
fundamental efficacy of God in the cosmos. The doctrine of the fall made
it possible for Saint Augustine to accept the doctrine of the creation.
Both belonged to the same mythical region in which the moral values of
life were made to figure as metaphysical agents; but when once the
metaphysical agency of the highest good was admitted into a poetic
cosmogony, it became imperative to admit also the metaphysical agency of
sin into it; for otherwise the highest good would be deprived of its
ideal and moral character, would cease to be the entelechy of rational
life, and be degraded into a flat principle of description or synthesis
for experience and nature as they actually are. God would thus become