a
natural agent, like the fire of Heraclitus, in which human piety could
take an interest only by force of traditional inertia and
unintelligence, while the continued muttering of the ritual prevented
men from awaking to the disappearance of the god. The essence of deity,
as Augustine was inwardly convinced, was correspondence to human
aspiration, moral perfection, and ideality. God, therefore, as the
Manicheans, with Plato and Aristotle before them, had taught, could be
the author of good only; or, to express the same thing in less
figurative and misleading language, it was only the good in things that
could contribute to our idea of divinity. What was evil must, therefore,
be carried up into another concept, must be referred, if you will, to
another mythical agent; and this mythical agent in Saint Augustine's
theology was named sin.

[Sidenote: Original sin.]

Everything in the world which obscured the image of the creator or
rebelled against his commandments (everything, that is, which prevented
in things the expression of their natural ideals) was due to sin. Sin
was responsible for disease of mind and body, for all suffering, for
death, for ignorance, perversity, and dulness. Sin was responsible--so
truly _original_ was it--for what was painful and wrong even in the
animal kingdom, and sin--such was the paradoxical apex of this inverted
series of causes--sin was responsible for sin itself. The insoluble
problems of the origin of evil and of freedom, in a world produced in
its every fibre by omnipotent goodness, can never be understood until we
remember their origin. They are artificial problems, unknown to
philosophy before it betook itself to the literal justification of
fables in which the objects of rational endeavour were represented as
causes of natural existence. The former are internal products of life,
the latter its external conditions. When the two are confused we reach
the contradiction confronting Saint Augustine, and all who to this day
have followed in his steps. The cause of everything must have been the
cause of sin, yet the principle of good could not be the principle of
evil. Both propositions were obviously true, and they were contradictory
only after the mythical identification of the God which meant the ideal
of life with the God which meant the forces of nature.

[Sidenote: Forced abandonment of the ideal.]

It would help us little, in trying to understand these doctrines, to
work over t