he dialectic of them, and to express the contradiction in
somewhat veiled terms or according to new pictorial analogies. Good and
evil, in the context of life, undoubtedly have common causes; but that
system which involves both is for that very reason not an ideal system,
and to represent it as such is simply to ignore the conscience and the
upward effort of life. The contradiction can be avoided only by
renouncing the meaning of one of the terms; either, that is, by no
longer regarding the good as an absolute creator, but merely as a
partial result or tendency in a living world whose life naturally
involves values, or else by no longer conceiving God as the ideal term
in man's own existence. The latter is the solution adopted by
metaphysicians generally, and by Saint Augustine himself when hard
pressed by the exigencies of his double allegiance. God, he tells us, is
just, although not just as man is, _nor as man should be_. In other
words, God is to be called just even when he is unjust in the only sense
in which the word justice has a meaning among men. We are forced, in
fact, to obscure our moral concepts and make them equivocal in order to
be able to apply them to the efficient forces and actual habits of this
world. The essence of divinity is no longer moral excellence, but
ontological and dynamic relations to the natural world, so that the love
of God would have to become, not an exercise of reason and conscience,
as it naturally was with Saint Augustine, but a mystical intoxication,
as it was with Spinoza.

The sad effects of this degradation of God into a physical power are not
hard to trace in Augustine's own doctrine and feeling. He became a
champion of arbitrary grace and arbitrary predestination to perdition.
The eternal damnation of innocents gave him no qualms; and in this we
must admire the strength of his logic, since if it is right that there
should be wrong at all, there is no particular reason for stickling at
the quantity or the enormity of it. And yet there are sentences which
for their brutality and sycophancy cannot be read without
pain--sentences inspired by this misguided desire to apologise for the
crimes of the universe. "Why should God not create beings that he
foreknew were to sin, when indeed in their persons and by their fates
he could manifest both what punishment their guilt deserved and what
free gifts he might bestow on them by his favour?" "Thinking it more
lordly and better to do wel