undamental to that morality with which
Christianity and modern civilization have identified themselves. It is
but another aspect of the doctrine of freedom and responsibility. Of
physical and necessary evil it is possible to assert the merely negative
or relative character; we can view it as the good in process of making;
or as the good imperfectly comprehended; but if this optimism be
extended to sin it can only be because sin is regarded as necessitated,
_i.e._, as no longer sin. Hence the view in question does not account
for, but implicitly denies the existence of sin.

Furthermore, the whole tendency of more recent idealism is to explain
moral evil as an offence against man's social nature by which he is a
member of an organism or community. It is the undue self-assertion of
the part against the interests of the whole. Of course the idealist
explains this organic conception with a respect for personality which is
absent from socialistic and evolutionary doctrines of society. But the
notion of sin as a rebellion of one member against all, is common to
both. The latter consider the external life and activity of the unit as
an element in the collective external life of the community--as part of
a common work; the former considers the unity as a free spiritual
agency, an end for itself--whose liberty is curtailed only by the claims
of other like agencies, equal or greater. But by what process, apart
from faith and practical postulates and regulative ideas, can
subjectivism pass to belief in other free agencies outside the thinking
and all-creating self? The result of Mr, D'Arcy's criticism of the
matter is that "it is because the man exists as a member of a spiritual
universe, and must therefore so exert his power of self-determination as
to be in harmony or discord with God above him, and with other men
around him, that the distinction between the good self and the bad self
arises. But in this very conception of a universe of spirits we have
passed beyond the bounds of a purely rational philosophy. Such a
universe is not explicable by reference to the vivifying principle of
the self;" and accordingly we are driven back as before upon the
alternative of philosophical chaos, or else of faith in such a
superpersonal unity as is suggested by the doctrine of the Trinity.

We have but hinted at the barest outlines of Mr. D'Arcy's argument
which, as against Idealism, is close-reasoned and subtle; and now we
have left but li