IV

MORAL DEPTHS AND HEIGHTS

UR discussion of the highways of thought

resulted in the adoption of that one which leads us deepest into life, and finds the test of truth not only in the experiences of the senses and the categories of the intellect, but also in the sense of beauty, in the postulates of the moral nature, and in the victories and defeats of our practical life. Our study of certain typical ways in which men have sought the experience of the Eternal, while finding much of value in mysticism, ultimately took us out of doors into the daylight of human history and amidst the activities in which moral personality is developed. Again, our consideration of the problem of the world's apparent aimlessness has led us to see that the most adequate modern views of the cosmos corroborate strongly the faith that the whole is becoming the expression

of one increasing purpose. But all of these solutions, genuine as they surely are, nevertheless confront us the more directly with another of humanity's problems, and the most urgent of them all. This is the problem of moral evil. In the pathway of upward development we have fellowship with God, but what befalls us when we go astray? How, in this universe of God, can we go astray? Does God cast off his people? Do we stumble that we may fall? In our fall is there any pain to him, and is there any hope of recovery for us? Whether we do well or ill, is all to the glory of God? If not, whose is the shame?

The thought of the ruin of any human interest brings an overshadowing gravity upon one's spirit. The sheep graze peacefully in the sunshine on the mounds of Mesopotamia, but shall we forget that one of those mounds is the ruin of Nineveh? Sable Island might hold our attention only for its bleak picturesqueness, did we not know that hundreds of ships had beaten themselves to pieces on its rocks. That desolated spot by the street might concern us no more than an abandoned brick-kiln, if it did

not contain the ashes of a home. Napoleon's dreams of empire cannot arouse the merely peaceful interest that we take in those of Sir Thomas More, when we remember what devastation the former brought to Europe. So we cannot take the universe in a merely lighthearted way, when once its moral catastrophes have come home to us. The history of the ruined and buried splendors of the moral world, the shipwrecked characters, the devastated loves, the wide havoc that one man's sin may work in society, are calculated to arouse our thinking out of the superficiality into which it is so apt to fall, with the stern demand that we face the facts of life, and that we make any conclusion which we venture to put forward bear most directly on those facts. It is in the possible issues of the moral life for good or ill that the deep tragedy of existence lies. Here is where the glory and the gloom of life enfold each other with a more than Rembrandtian mystery. This is indeed the place for faith to do its boldest work. But must faith work in an altogether blind way? Or are there great convictions founded in experience to sustain it? And in

particular, can the monotheism of Jesus Christ be adopted as a belief that is loyal at once to the facts and the ideals involved, and so as a true basis for the endeavors of faith? The problem of moral evil is then our present theme, and the discussion of it can best be brought into relation to the preceding lectures by taking up, first, the treatment of this problem given by absolute idealism, and secondly, the solution to which our interpretation of Christian theology leads.

I

The treatment of the problem of moral evil by absolute idealism, especially as it is found in Professor Royce's writings, is governed by certain motives which give it great strength. One of these motives appears in the determination to give full recognition to the reality of moral evil, and not to let the vision of the painful contrasts which actually exist in the moral world be blurred by the doctrine of the oneness of all reality. A second motive is the desire to show that God is most intimately related to the moral struggles of our lives, that he triumphs

in our successes and suffers in our defeats. A third motive is manifested in the effort to prove that the resources of God are adequate for overcoming all moral evil, and that his triumph is sure. These are all motives which inevitably arise in the morally earnest soul, and a doctrine that really does justice to each deserves a hearty welcome. We therefore shall do well to estimate the teachings of absolute idealism in regard to our theme by considering how far they give to these motives satisfactory expression.

Beginning with the motive first mentioned, we are led to ask how far absolute idealism succeeds in giving full recognition to the reality of moral evil. A theory which is to explain a set of facts must not end by explaining them away. Particularly is this true in the ethical realm, for the facts nevertheless remain, and, like reefs in a fog-bank, are all the more a source of danger because of the theory that obscures them. Now Professor Royce emphasizes the reality of evil by distinguishing his conception of it sharply from that of mysticism. To the philosophical mystic evil in all its forms is ultimately unreal. This is because unreality