ternally happy. If he did not live a good life but finally
"believed" before death he will be saved anyway and be just as happy as
though he had lived right from the start. If he did live a good life,
but was not born with the ability to believe easily, he will be lost and
will be eternally miserable. According to this theory of special
creation God makes people of all sorts. None of them can help being what
they are created. Some are wise and some are foolish. Those who are
smart enough to find the way of salvation will finally have heaven added
to their original gift of wisdom. Those who are not smart enough to find
it will finally have hell added to their original lack of sense. This is
what some people are pleased to call divine justice!

It will hardly do to argue that the possibility that all may at last be
happy in an endless heaven, makes it unimportant that there are
inequalities now. The majority of the theologians do not admit that such
a state awaits the whole of the human race, and the comparatively few
who do believe it will hardly venture to assert that present justice can
be determined by future happiness. Even if we positively knew that
eternal bliss awaited everybody after the close of this physical life
how could that make it just that one person shall be born a congenital
criminal and another shall be born a poet and philosopher? How could it
make it right that one is born to life-long illness, suffering and
poverty, while another inherits both wealth and a sound physical body?
Not even the certainty of future happiness would be compensation for
present inequalities. But why should there be any such inequalities if
God represents unlimited power and perfect justice? Why should there be
any poverty when, if He really created the soul itself instantaneously,
He can as certainly create any necessary condition for the soul? Why
poverty and disease and suffering at all? There must be a better answer
to such questions than that "it pleased God to have it so." It is surely
little better than blasphemy to suggest that any kind of hard conditions
for man are pleasing to the deity.

To hold that any future condition of happiness can make present justice
out of the truly terrible inequalities of life, would be much like a
millionaire who has two sons giving one of them all the advantages of
wealth, travel, skilled instructors and special care, while the other
was permitted to wear rags and go hungry. If the neg