to the nature of God. If he is not willing
and cannot, there is both wickedness and impotence. If he is
willing and can, which is the only one of these suppositions that
can be applied to God, how happens it that there is evil on earth?

Oh, if only the world had been influenced by this logic instead of by
the metaphysics of the supernaturalistic interpretations of religion, it
would have been so far on the way towards the ideal civilization as to
have long since passed the point where it would have been possible to
have the world war which has recently deluged the earth with blood and
tears, or to make the Versailles treaty which is destined to issue in
one war after another, ever filling the world fuller with the tyranny,
poverty, slavery and misery which are the inevitable concomitants of all
wars.

In my opinion the fascinating essayist, Mallock, has written the best of
all apologies for theism. I cannot imagine a better one. He, however,
makes no more attempt than Sir Oliver Lodge does to establish
Christianity, or any other supernaturalistic interpretations of
religion. Like Kant and yourself, Mallock takes his stand on the ground
that a belief in a celestial God, and in the immortality which goes with
it, is necessary to morality, the basic virtue upon which civilization
rests. As Kant admits that the existence of God cannot be inferred from
pure reason, so Mallock admits and even strongly contends that it cannot
be established on scientific grounds. I quote a striking passage:

We must divest ourselves of all foregone conclusions, of all
question-begging reverences, and look the facts of the universe
steadily in the face.

If theists will but do this, what they will see will astonish them.
They will see that if there is anything at the back of this vast
process, with a consciousness and a purpose in any way resembling
our own--a Being who knows what he wants and is doing his best to
get it--he is, instead of a holy and all-wise God, a
scatter-brained, semi-powerful, semi-impotent monster. They will
recognize as clearly as they ever did the old familiar facts which
seemed to them evidences of God's wisdom, love and goodness; but
they will find that these facts, when taken in connection with the
others, only supply us with a standard in the nature of this being
himself by which most of his acts are exhibited to us as those of a