Page:The kernel and the husk (Abbott, 1886).djvu/84

68 Devil." Or take a spectacle of the Middle Ages as a problem. In the lists are two armed knights; on the one side a man of might and muscle, exulting in conflict; on the other, a slight, weak creature, who never fights save on compulsion, and is to fight now on sternest compulsion, being accused (though innocent) of some gross crime by yonder man of flesh, who combines scoundrel, liar, traitor, oppressor, thief, and adulterer, all in one; and the fight is to begin under the sanction of the Church of Christ. As the trumpets sound, while the heralds are still calling on God to "shew the right," the two men meet, and "the right" is cast to the ground, trampled on by his enemy, and dragged from the lists to the neighbouring gallows, while the muscular scoundrel wipes his forehead and receives congratulations. Do you suppose that the innocent man's wife, if she were looking on, would be able easily to say at that moment, "Verily there is a God that judgeth the earth"?

Can I possibly put the case for scepticism more strongly? I would fain put it with all the force in my power in order to convince you that I have thought often over these matters, and that, although my own life may have been happy and free from stumbling-blocks, I have at least tried to understand and sympathize with those who find it very hard to believe that there is a God. But, in the presence of such monstrous evils as these, I take refuge in a belief and in a fact; first, in the belief (which runs through almost every page of the Gospels and has received the sanction of Christ Himself) that there is an Evil Being in the world who is continually opposing the Good but will be ultimately subdued by the Good; secondly, in the fact that in one great typical conflict between Good and Evil,—where apparently God did not "shew the right," and where, in appearance, there was consummated the most brutal triumph of Evil over Good that the world