And certainly they who do
not know the absolutism of evil cannot very well understand sinners.
Genuine satans, as Milton knew, are not weaklings and traitors who
have declined from the standards of a respectable civilization. They
are positive and impressive figures pursuing and acting up to their
own ideal of conduct, not fleeing from self-accepted retribution or
falling away from a confessed morality of ours. Evil is a force even
more than a folly; it is a positive agent busily building away at the
City of Dreadful Night, constructing its insolent and scoffing society
within the very precincts of the City of God.
He must know, then, that evil and suffering are not temporary elements
of man's evolution, just about to be eliminated by the new reform,
the last formula, the fresh panacea. To those who have tasted grief
and smelt the fire such easy preaching and such confident solutions
are a grave offense. They know that evil is an integral part of our
universe; suffering an enduring element of the whole. So he must
preach upon the chances and changes of this mortal world, or go to
the house of shame or the place of mourning, knowing that there is
something past finding out in evil, something incommunicable about
true sorrow. They are not external things, alien to our natures, that
happen one day from without, and may perhaps be avoided, and by and
by are gone.
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