of
himself in relation to the Creator's Will.

If there is Purpose in the universe there is Will; you cannot have
Purpose or intelligent direction, without Will. But, as we have seen,
"to speak about an immanent will is nonsense":

It is the purpose, the meaning and thought of God, that is immanent
not God Himself. He is not limited to the world that He has made;
He is beyond it, the source and ground of it all, but not it. Just
as you may say that in Shakespeare's work his thoughts and feelings
are immanent; you find them there in the book, but you don't find
Shakespeare, the living, thinking, acting man, in the book. You
have to infer the kind of being that he was from what he wrote; he
himself is not there; his thoughts are there.

He pronounces "the most real of all problems," the problem of evil, to
be soluble. _Why is there no problem of good?_ Note well, that "the
problem of evil is always a problem in terms of purpose." How evil came
does not matter: the question is, Why is it here? What is it doing?
"While we are sitting at our ease it generally seems to us that the
world would be very much better if all evil were abolished. . . . But would
it?"

Surely we know that one of the best of the good things in life is
victory, and particularly moral victory. But to demand victory
without an antagonist is to demand something with no meaning.

If you take all the evil out of the world you will remove the
possibility of the best thing in life. That does not mean that evil
is good. What one means by calling a thing good is that the spirit
rests permanently content with it for its own sake. Evil is
precisely that with which no spirit can rest content; and yet it is
the condition, not the accidental but the essential condition, of
what is in and for itself the best thing in life, namely moral
victory.

His definition of Sin helps us to understand his politics:

Sin is the self-assertion either of a part of a man's nature
against the whole, or of a single member of the human family
against the welfare of that family and the will of its Father.

But if it is self-will, he asks, how is it to be overcome?

Not by any kind of force; for force cannot bend the will. Not by
any kind of external transaction; that may remit the penalty, but
will not of itself change the will. It must be by the revelat