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workings of Divine Providence, Fate, and Fortune--a fairly skilful piece
of dialectic dealing with a hopeless difficulty. Next come Virtue and
Vice, and, in a dead and perfunctory echo of Plato's _Republic_, an
enumeration of the good and bad forms of human society. The questions
which vibrated with life in free Athens had become meaningless to a
despot-governed world. Then follows more adventurous matter.

First a chapter headed: 'Whence Evil things come, and that there is no
_Phusis Kakou_--Evil is not a real thing.' 'It is perhaps best', he
says, 'to observe at once that, since the gods are good and make
everything, there is no positive evil; there is only absence of good;
just as there is no positive darkness, only absence of light.'

What we call 'evils' arise only in the activities of men, and even here
no one ever does evil for the sake of evil. 'One who indulges in some
pleasant vice thinks the vice bad but his pleasure good; a murderer
thinks the murder bad, but the money he will get by it, good; one who
injures an enemy thinks the injury bad, but the being quits with his
enemy, good'; and so on. The evil acts are all done for the sake of some
good, but human souls, being very far removed from the original flawless
divine nature, make mistakes or sins. One of the great objects of the
world, he goes on to explain, of gods, men, and spirits, of religious
institutions and human laws alike, is to keep the souls from these
errors and to purge them again when they have fallen.

Next comes a speculative difficulty. Sallustius has called the world
'eternal in the fullest sense'--that is, it always has been and always
will be. And yet it is 'made' by the gods. How are these statements
compatible? If it was made, there must have been a time before it was
made. The answer is ingenious. It is not made by handicraft as a table
is; it is not begotten as a son by a father. It is the result of a
quality of God just as light is the result of a quality of the sun. The
sun causes light, but the light is there as soon as the sun is there.
The world is simply the other side, as it were, of the goodness of God,
and has existed as long as that goodness has existed.

Next come some simpler questions about man's relation to the gods. In
what sense do we say that the gods are angry with the wicked or are
appeased by repentance? Sallustius is quite firm. The gods cannot ever
be glad--for that which is glad is also sorry; cannot be a