sidered. How, it will be asked, can you assume the impossibility of evil and yet at the same time assume the highest perfection of what is good? How can you assume, for instance, the highest possible type of manhood without supposing he is a free agent, and, if a free agent, free to do wrong? You cannot conceive of any possible adjustment of laws, any possible system of things which must of necessity produce nothing but what is good, without excluding conditions which alone render the highest good possible. It is like assuming the possibility of a perfect light while denying the possibility of a shadow.

It is an old difficulty, but I do not think it need trouble us much. It is just one of those perplexities through which plain people may see their way to a sound conclusion, while cleverer and more metaphysical minds may go wandering in a wilderness of difficulty.

I suppose we are all agreed that human nature is the highest outcome of the creation of which we have any knowledge, and we are all agreed that an essential characteristic of the highest manhood is free-will. If you take away a man's power to do wrong, no doubt you injure his manhood by depriving him of the firmness and fortitude that come of trial and test, and of the conscious merit of doing right. There is a sense in which every man is and must be free to do any and every evil within his power if he is to be a man. And yet you and I know perfectly well that there is also a sense in which it is quite correct to say the higher the man, the nobler and stronger the character, the more impossible it becomes for him to do evil. It is, no

doubt, possible, in a sense, for you to murder your neighbour's child; and yet, while your brain is untouched by disease-while you remain a man, that is to say is it possible? The Archbishop of Canterbury is a high-minded gentleman, and he has £15,000 a year. Is it possible for him to take advantage of an opportunity to pick eighteenpence from a poor man's pocket? Why, yes, of course it is, in a sense, quite possible. If the Archbishop literally could never have picked a pocket or robbed an offertory, I suppose he never could have acquired the high-minded conscious integrity which renders this possibility quite impossible. The truth is that while men are literally and absolutely free to do this, that, and the other thing, their doing depends upon their thinking, and there are laws of thought as inexorable and irresistible as the law of gravitation. Assuming that these laws are perfect in their operation, and that they are working through a perfect human organism, though the man may be quite free to go wrong, it must be as impossible for him to do so as it is for water to run uphill or for a rock to hang suspended in the air. He may be, he must be, a free man, but he can no more escape from the immutable laws of thought which are imposed upon him for the express purpose of inclining him to do right than he can escape from the law of heredity. The very fact that a man ever wilfully goes wrong is proof of a want of adjustment. The law of mind is not perfectly adapted to the man or the man to the law. A perfectly healthy mind in a perfectly healthy body, placed in a perfectly organised world and ruled by laws absolutely adapted to the whole system of things, could not possibly

think erroneously upon any subject involving questions of good or evil, could not possibly desire to do wrong, and yet that mind shall be free-literally free. It is a perfect organism in a perfect environment. That means health and happiness and goodness, strength and beauty-perfect life.

BUT, it will be objected, such a world of perfect adjustment is quite inconceivable, and even if it were not, it would be a world not worth living in. There could be nothing like physical, mental, or moral thew and sinew. An earth in which sunbeams were never too hot and winter never too cold, in which every creature had just what was requisite, and something corresponding to governor balls always came into play in the nick of time to prevent even so much as discomfort, would be no world at all for the training of men. It might be all very well for rose gardens, but for men-never. Instead of striving upwards to higher existence and nobler life, the race would inevitably go down in degeneration and decay.

Moreover, the biologist will, of course, come in with the one all-important objection to which already some allusion has been made. It is the maladjustments, I shall be sure to be reminded again, that have really been the means of evolving the world of life. There are your specks of protoplasm, your monera, your very earliest forms of life, sticking to the rock or drifting in the water. Your suggestion, says the

reader, is that they have come from the hands of the Creator quite perfect in themselves, perfect in all their powers and possibilities, perfect in all the conditions and surroundings of their existence, and that, you contend, would have been the case in each successive stage of life development, from monera to men.

"But," says the biologist, "if they are perfect in themselves, and if everything around them is adjusted to their needs with the nicest possible accuracy, how is the process of development coming about? There is the dawn of sentient existence, how are you going from that small beginning to develop all the unimaginable gradations of life till you get your perfect man and woman ?" As a matter of fact, philosophers tell us, development has come about not by happiness, not by the perfect gratification of all natural craving, not by entirely suitable environment. On the contrary, all progress has been the result of strife and struggle and a general environment which constantly tends to kill off all but the "fittest." "Without the vigorous weeding of the imperfect," say our scientific writers, "the progress of the world would not have been possible." Advance everywhere is by struggle with adverse surroundings, and it is just because only the very strongest and best are able to survive the incessant wrestling with unfavourable conditions and legions of enemies that life has moved upwards. If all living creatures were perfect of their kind and there were no adverse surroundings whatever, every living thing would continue to live until it had run its natural course, whatever it might be. There would be no development, no progress, for there would be no demand for exertion. There would be no "survival of the fittest," for all would be perfect and all would