be, in spite of all appearances. In making up the balance for or
against absolutism, this emotional value weights heavily the credit
side of the account.

The trouble is that we are able to see so little into the positive
detail of it, and that if once admitted not to be coercively proven
by the intellectualist arguments, it remains only a hypothetic
possibility.

On the debit side of the account the absolute, taken seriously, and
not as a mere name for our right occasionally to drop the strenuous
mood and take a moral holiday, introduces all those tremendous
irrationalities into the universe which a frankly pluralistic theism
escapes, but which have been flung as a reproach at every form of
monistic theism or pantheism. It introduces a speculative 'problem
of evil' namely, and leaves us wondering why the perfection of the
absolute should require just such particular hideous forms of life as
darken the day for our human imaginations. If they were forced on it
by something alien, and to 'overcome' them the absolute had still to
keep hold of them, we could understand its feeling of triumph, though
we, so far as we were ourselves among the elements overcome, could
acquiesce but sullenly in the resultant situation, and would never
just have chosen it as the most rational one conceivable. But the
absolute is represented as a being without environment, upon which
nothing alien can be forced, and which has spontaneously chosen from
within to give itself the spectacle of all that evil rather than a
spectacle with less evil in it.[9] Its perfection is represented as
the source of things, and yet the first effect of that perfection is
the tremendous imperfection of all finite experience. In whatever
sense the word 'rationality' may be taken, it is vain to contend that
the impression made on our finite minds by such a way of representing
things is altogether rational. Theologians have felt its irrationality
acutely, and the 'fall,' the predestination, and the election which
the situation involves have given them more trouble than anything else
in their attempt to pantheize Christianity. The whole business remains
a puzzle, both intellectually and morally.

Grant that the spectacle or world-romance offered to itself by the
absolute is in the absolute's eyes perfect. Why would not the world be
more perfect by having the affair remain in just those terms, and
by not having any finite spectators to come in and add to what was
per