se--true of the
physical orders as well--until it assumed the dismal aspect it wears
to-day. Excellent! The _Greeks_ looked upon the world and the gods as
the work of an inscrutable necessity. A passable explanation: we may
be content with it until we can get a better. Again, _Ormuzd_ and
_Ahriman_ are rival powers, continually at war. That is not bad. But
that a God like Jehovah should have created this world of misery and
woe, out of pure caprice, and because he enjoyed doing it, and should
then have clapped his hands in praise of his own work, and declared
everything to be very good--that will not do at all! In its
explanation of the origin of the world, Judaism is inferior to any
other form of religious doctrine professed by a civilized nation;
and it is quite in keeping with this that it is the only one which
presents no trace whatever of any belief in the immortality of the
soul.[1]

[Footnote 1: See _Parerga_, vol. i. pp. 139 _et seq_.]

Even though Leibnitz' contention, that this is the best of all
possible worlds, were correct, that would not justify God in having
created it. For he is the Creator not of the world only, but of
possibility itself; and, therefore, he ought to have so ordered
possibility as that it would admit of something better.

There are two things which make it impossible to believe that this
world is the successful work of an all-wise, all-good, and, at the
same time, all-powerful Being; firstly, the misery which abounds in
it everywhere; and secondly, the obvious imperfection of its highest
product, man, who is a burlesque of what he should be. These things
cannot be reconciled with any such belief. On the contrary, they are
just the facts which support what I have been saying; they are our
authority for viewing the world as the outcome of our own misdeeds,
and therefore, as something that had better not have been. Whilst,
under the former hypothesis, they amount to a bitter accusation
against the Creator, and supply material for sarcasm; under the latter
they form an indictment against our own nature, our own will, and
teach us a lesson of humility. They lead us to see that, like the
children of a libertine, we come into the world with the burden of sin
upon us; and that it is only through having continually to atone for
this sin that our existence is so miserable, and that its end is
death.

There is nothing more certain than the general truth that it is the
grievous _sin of the wor