l even in the presence of evil than not to
allow evil to exist at all." Here the pitiful maxim of doing evil that
good may come is robbed of the excuse it finds in human limitations and
is made the first principle of divine morality. Repellent and contorted
as these ultimate metaphysical theories may seem, we must not suppose
that they destroyed in Saint Augustine that practical and devotional
idealism which they contradicted: the region of Christian charity is
fortunately far wider and far nearer home than that of Christian
apologetics. The work of practical redemption went on, while the
dialectics about the perfection of the universe were forgotten; and
Saint Augustine never ceased, by a happy inconsistency, to bewail the
sins and to combat the heresies which his God was stealthily nursing, so
that in their melodramatic punishment his glory might be more
beautifully manifested.

[Sidenote: The problem among the protestants.]

It was Saint Augustine, as we know, who, in spite of his fervid
Catholicism, was the favourite master of both Luther and Calvin. They
emphasised, however, his more fanatical side, and this very
predestinarian and absolutist doctrine which he had prevailed on himself
to accept. Here was the pantheistic leaven doing its work; and
concentration of attention on the Old Testament, given the reformers'
controversial and metaphysical habit of thought, could only precipitate
the inevitable. While popular piety bubbled up into all sorts of
emotional and captious sects, each with its pathetic insistence on some
text or on some whimsey, but all inwardly inspired by an earnest
religious hunger, academic and cultivated Protestantism became every day
more pale and rationalistic. Mediocre natures continued to rehearse the
old platitudes and tread the slippery middle courses of one orthodoxy or
another; but distinguished minds could no longer treat such survivals as
more than allegories, historic or mythical illustrations of general
spiritual truths. So Lessing, Goethe, and the idealists in Germany, and
after them such lay prophets as Carlyle and Emerson, had for
Christianity only an inessential respect. They drank their genuine
inspiration directly from nature, from history, from the total personal
apprehension they might have of life. In them speculative theology
rediscovered its affinity to neo-Platonism; in other words, Christian
philosophy was washed clean of its legendary alloy to become a pure
cosmic sp