Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/483

458 said that evil exists in the world as a means to goodness. We objected to this that it puts the evil and the good first in separate beings, in separate acts or moments, and then makes the attainment of the good result dependent on the prior attainment of the separate and independently present evil. Now all that explanation could only explain and justify the acts of a finite Power, which, not yet possessing a given good thing, seeks it through the mediation of some evil. In no wise can this explanation apply to God as infinite. He is no finite Power, nor does he make or get things external to himself. Hence he cannot be said to use means for the attainment of ends. But our explanation does not make evil a means to get the separate end, goodness. We say that the connection is one of organic part with organic whole; that goodness has its life only in the instant of the discovery and inner overcoming of the evil will; and that therefore any life is good in which the evil will is present only as overcome, and so as lost in the good will. We appeal to the moral experience to illustrate how, when we do good, the evil will is present as a real fact in us, which yet does not make us as a whole bad, but just because it is present as an overcome element, is, even for that very reason, necessary to make us good. And we go on to say that even so in God the evil will of all who sin is present, a real fact in the Divine Life, no illusion in so far as one sees that it exists in God and nowhere else, but for that very reason an element, and a necessary element, in the total goodness of the Universal Will, which, realized in God, is related to the