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242 against us, but are really the deepest truth of things. Else we shall be left face to face with a gloomy world of conflict, where the good and bad are mingled in hopeless confusion. If such a world is the fact, we must accept that fact; but we cannot then say that we have made sure of an answer to our religious needs. Now suppose that in examining the world we found two tendencies at work, equally fundamental, equally active, fairly balanced in power, producing in the long run equally permanent, equally transient results, but always in deadly antagonism to each other, the one making for moral goodness, the other for moral evil. Suppose that the world appeared as the theatre and the result of this struggle of the good and of the evil principles, could we say that we had found in these facts a religious aspect of reality? We should hardly answer in the affirmative. So long as we must fix our minds on this struggle of equally balanced powers, we could not find the world a religiously encouraging vision. We should either have to regard the world in some other and higher aspect, or we should have to give up regarding it as religiously interesting. An answer to our moral needs that is drowned by a hubbub of opposing noises can be no harmonious song. Now we affirm that so long as you look upon the world as a growth in time, as a product of natural forces, as an historical development, you can never make it certain, or even probable, that this world is not such a scene of endless warfare. Hence the progress that you may observe can never overbalance the probability that this progress is a transient and insignificant fact, in