there is no dispute. And the moral
justification of the cosmic process while intellectually indefensible,
adds an element of moral repulsion. That the process as we know it is
morally repugnant is shown by the appeal to the future, the request to
suspend judgment till such time as the plan is completed, when it is
hoped that the end will justify the means. God, it is trusted, will
justify himself in the future. But in his anxiety to impress upon us
the fact that God has a moral future the theist forgets that he has had
a past, and that past is a black one. The uncounted generations of
suffering in the past is not to be compensated by a probable happiness
in the future. The myriads of organisms that have lived incomplete
lives, and ended them in deaths of suffering are not cancelled by the
probability that at some time, still in the future, a comparatively
small number will lead lives of happiness. The record is there, "there
is blood upon the hand," and not all the apologies of a self-convicted
animism can ever wipe it clean.

CHAPTER IX.

THE PROBLEM OF PAIN.

The problem of how to harmonise the existence of a God as believers
picture him to be with a world such as experience discloses, is as old
as theology. And the problem will disappear only when theology is given
up as an aggregate of question begging words and gratuitous hypotheses
based upon a foundation of primitive ignorance and inherited delusion.
For the majority of those questions that are properly called theological
are not of the necessary order. Questions such as those connected with
the mutations of matter, the development of life, the growth of society,
or the nature and clash of human passions cannot be evaded. They are
present in the facts themselves. But the problems of theology are
self-created; they arise out of certain beliefs, and have no existence
apart from those beliefs. They are the joint product of beliefs which
are wholly useless, in conflict with facts with which they cannot be
squared.

What is known as "The Problem of Evil" is an apt illustration of the
truth of what has been said. Here there is created a problem which is
not alone quite gratuitous, but it succeeds in inverting the real
question at issue. For unless we accept the world as the product of a
good and wise God, there is no problem of evil for us to explain. The
problem of evil is, given such a deity, how to account for the existence
of evil, or, if it exists, ho