He is not limited to the world that He has made;
He is beyond it, the source and ground of it all, but not it. Just
as you may say that in Shakespeare's work his thoughts and feelings
are immanent; you find them there in the book, but you don't find
Shakespeare, the living, thinking, acting man, in the book. You
have to infer the kind of being that he was from what he wrote; he
himself is not there; his thoughts are there.
He pronounces "the most real of all problems," the problem of evil, to
be soluble. _Why is there no problem of good?_ Note well, that "the
problem of evil is always a problem in terms of purpose." How evil came
does not matter: the question is, Why is it here? What is it doing?
"While we are sitting at our ease it generally seems to us that the
world would be very much better if all evil were abolished. . . . But would
it?"
Surely we know that one of the best of the good things in life is
victory, and particularly moral victory. But to demand victory
without an antagonist is to demand something with no meaning.
If you take all the evil out of the world you will remove the
possibility of the best thing in life. That does not mean that evil
is good. What one means by calling a thing good is that the spirit
rests permanently content with it for its own sake. Evil is
precisely that with which no spirit can rest content; and yet it is
the condition, not the accidental but the essential condition, of
what is in and for itself the best thing in life, namely moral
victory.
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