rust of the divine Grace, telling thee of thy misery,
and making a giant of it; and putting it into thy head that every day
thy soul grows worse instead of better, whilst it so often repeats
these failings. O blessed Soul, open thine eyes; and shut the gate
against these diabolical suggestions, knowing thy misery, and trusting
in the mercy divine. Would not he be a mere fool who, running at
tournament with others, and falling in the best of the career, should
lie weeping on the ground and afflicting himself with discourses upon
his fall? Man (they would tell him), lose no time, get up and take the
course again, for he that rises again quickly and continues his race is
as if he had never fallen. If thou seest thyself fallen once and a
thousand times, thou oughtest to make use of the remedy which I have
given thee, that is, a loving confidence in the divine mercy. These
are the weapons with which thou must fight and conquer cowardice and
vain thoughts. This is the means thou oughtest to use--not to lose
time, not to disturb thyself, and reap no good."[68]

[68] Molinos: Spiritual Guide, Book II., chaps. xvii., xviii.
abridged.

Now in contrast with such healthy-minded views as these, if we treat
them as a way of deliberately minimizing evil, stands a radically
opposite view, a way of maximizing evil, if you please so to call it,
based on the persuasion that the evil aspects of our life are of its
very essence, and that the world's meaning most comes home to us when
we lay them most to heart. We have now to address ourselves to this
{129} more morbid way of looking at the situation. But as I closed our
last hour with a general philosophical reflection on the healthy-minded
way of taking life, I should like at this point to make another
philosophical reflection upon it before turning to that heavier task.
You will excuse the brief delay.

If we admit that evil is an essential part of our being and the key to
the interpretation of our life, we load ourselves down with a
difficulty that has always proved burdensome in philosophies of
religion. Theism, whenever it has erected itself into a systematic
philosophy of the universe, has shown a reluctance to let God be
anything less than All-in-All. In other words, philosophic theism has
always shown a tendency to become pantheistic and monistic, and to
consider the world as one unit of absolute fact; and this has been at
variance with popular or practical theism,