The ethical verdict against moral evil sounds on in the soul of man for ever. Out of our evil God may, no doubt, bring good; but evil is never, on that account, of itself contributory to good. It would be absurd to account it so. Our theistic philosophy can give it no necessary place in the plan and purpose of God: it is, as disobedience to the law of God and our own spiritual being, only evil and that continually. It holds this to be so, no matter how God our Saviour, Merciful and Almighty, may permit and overrule it for good. It asks, too, how we could ever think of that Primal Reality which called us into being, and made love the supreme law of our life, as Itself unloving, or other than Perfect Goodness. It says with Whittier, in his "Eternal Goodness".

"Yet, in the maddening maze of things,

And tossed by storm and flood,
To one fixed stake my spirit clings,

I know that God is good."

From all which it must surely be evident how little disposition has been shown by recent philosophy of theism to leave the problem of evil aside as a mere unsolvable and unfruitful inquiry, though it has a clearer sense, no doubt, that the final judgment must, in such a problem, be a teleological one. Meanwhile, the world is for it so far from a meaningless thing that "it means intensely, and means good." Yes, and if we cannot at present speculatively solve all the difficulties of

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the case, that is only because here we know but in part. But we know enough to give us refuge from pessimistic despair, and inspire us with such a faith in the future as will at least make it for us no longer impossible that the pessimist's view of the facts of life and the world should not be the only true or possible one. To us all the issues and ends of the present so run up into the future life that the speculative terminus for our problem may not be capable of being finally reached. But in our latest philosophy of theism we find deeper cause for holding fast the confidence that the facts presented by physical nature need not, and ought not, to overbear the suggestions of conscience, of revelation, and of our own hearts, which bid us believe that all things work together for our good.

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CHAPTER VI.

RECENT STUDY OF THE COSMOLOGICAL PROOF.

THE Cosmological Proof has, in recent theistic thought, had its true significance more acutely determined, and the reasons for its miscarriage more carefully defined. We regard the course of recent speculation as tending to prove the wisdom with which Mansel spoke when he declared the principle of causality to have been, and likely always to be, the battle-ground on which philosophy must fight for dear life in the struggle with scepticism. We do not think there can be any doubt of the real philosophical advances made in the sphere of causality—the progress in interpreting natural law or the observed order of Divine Action, and in laying down the logic of scientific thought or conception. In fact, the continuity traceable in the philosophical development is quite impressive. The self-evident character of the principle of causation has been properly insisted upon, and the metaphysic of causality has

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been more profoundly investigated with a view to the bearing on theistic thought of substance as the ground of phenomena. Not a mere foundation of being in the abstract does it seem in our view to have sought, but a real, actually existing, primitive ground (Urgrund) of all reality. The law itself has received more careful enunciation as having for its terms that every event not effect-must have a cause. The validity of the law has been more strongly vindicated alike as against those who, with Sir William Hamilton, gratuitously assume-in oversight of the positive character of its thought-affirmation-the law to be due to the impotence of the mind to transcend experience, and in opposition to those who, like J. S. Mill and others, have taken it to express only a time-relation or observed order of succession, so failing to keep in view the active power or efficient energy involved in relation to a real result. The causal problem is to be viewed as very different from any method of proof that makes the Divine existence a postulate-lacking therefore in sure basis for the proof from causality grounds itself on given facts, and follows the actual lines which causality leads, be they up from individual facts to the universal order and history of the world. The law is seen to be bound up in the bundle of fundamental knowledge in the sphere of science. The causal—and dynamical-power involved is discriminated as work

ing through all Nature, not as resident in its single objects, and the antecedents brought into play are differentiated as the conditions, but not the real causes, of the results. The actual world is taken to be but a perceptible unfolding, an appearance (Erscheinung), of the Urgrund or Primal Ground, but not for that reason unreal. With the world, in which He exhibits or represents Himself to us, He is, of course, not to be confounded.

The artificiality of our whole phenomenal sequence has been thoroughly laid bare before our evolutional science, with its correlation and convertibility of forces. The inadequacy of any scientific interpretation of phenomena, and the impossibility of any philosophical explanation, have been irrefragably shown to be the result, so long as power, creative or formative, is excluded from our notion of causation. Hence the absurd and meaningless aspect of cause when taken simply to signify antecedents, rather than the relation of phenomena to that which is real. The sheer impotence of science to do anything more for us than take us to the succession of antecedents and consequents cannot be too plainly expressed, and metaphysics must come to the rescue, if the idea of cause is really to be understood at all. While she tarries

"Philosophy, that leaned on heaven before,

Sinks to her second cause, and is no more."

Power, and not mere antecedence, is what the meta