le by human thought.
If God be all-pervading, all-in-all, it is impossible to conceive
anything coming into being alien to Himself, within Himself. If He
created spirits able to choose evil, He must have created the evil for
them to choose, for a man could not choose what did not exist; if man
can defy God, God must have given him the thought of defiance, for no
thought can enter the mind of man not permitted by God.

With this mystery unsolved, we cannot pretend to any knowledge of
spiritual things; all that we can do is to recognise that the principle
of Love is stronger than the principle of evil, and cling so far as we
can cling to the former. But to set ourselves up to guide and direct
other men, as the preacher did whose words I have quoted, is to set
oneself in the place of God, and is a detestable tyranny. Only by our
innate sense of Justice and Love can we apprehend God at all; and thus
we are safe in this, that whenever we find any doctrine preached by any
human being which insults our sense of justice and love, we may gladly
reject it, saying that at least we will not believe that God gives us
the power, on the one hand, to recognise our highest and truest
instincts, and on the other directs us to outrage them. Such teaching
as this we can infallibly recognise as a human perversion and not as a
divine message; and we may thankfully and gratefully believe that the
obstacles and difficulties, the temptations and troubles, which seem to
be strewn so thickly in our path, are to develop rather than to thwart
our strivings after good, and assuredly designed to minister to our
ultimate happiness, rather than to our ultimate despair.

April 25, 1889.

I found to-day on a shelf a Manual of Preparation for Holy Communion,
which was given me when I was confirmed. I stood a long time reading
it, and little ghosts seemed to rustle in its pages. How well I
remember using it, diligently and carefully, trying to force myself
into the attitude of mind that it inculcated, and humbly and sincerely
believing myself wicked, reprobate, stony-hearted, because I could not
do it successfully. Shall I make a curious confession? From quite early
days, the time of first waking in the morning has been apt to be for me
a time of mental agitation; any unpleasant and humiliating incident,
any disagreeable prospect, have always tended to dart into my brain,
which, unstrung and weakened by sleep, has often been disposed to view
things