of sin, evil, pain, is a symbol
of promotion. The peace of the state of nature has been broken for him;
and, although the first consequence be

"Brow-furrowed old age, youth's hollow cheek,--
Diseased in the body, sick in soul,
Pinched poverty, satiate wealth,--your whole
Array of despairs,"[D]

[Footnote D: _Ibid_.]

still, without them, the best is impossible. They are the conditions of
the moral life, which is essentially progressive. They are the
consequences of the fact that man has been "startled up"

"by an Infinite
Discovered above and below me--height
And depth alike to attract my flight,

"Repel my descent: by hate taught love.
Oh, gain were indeed to see above
Supremacy ever--to move, remove,

"Not reach--aspire yet never attain
To the object aimed at."[A]

[Footnote A: _Rephan_--_Asolando_.]

He who places rest above effort, Rephan above the earth, places a
natural good above a moral good, stagnation above progress. The demand
for the absolute extinction of evil betrays ignorance of the nature of
the highest good. For right and wrong are relative. "Type need
antitype." The fact that goodness is best, and that goodness is not a
stagnant state but a progress, a gradual realization, though never
complete, of an infinite ideal, of the perfection of God by a finite
being, necessarily implies the consciousness of sin and evil. As a moral
agent man must set what should be above what is. If he is to aspire and
attain, the actual present must seem to him inadequate, imperfect,
wrong, a state to be abolished in favour of a better. And therefore it
follows that

"Though wrong were right
Could we but know--still wrong must needs seem wrong
To do right's service, prove men weak or strong,
Choosers of evil or good."[B]

[Footnote B: _Francis Furini_.]

The apparent existence of evil is the condition of goodness. And yet it
must only be apparent. For if evil be regarded as veritably evil, it
must remain so for all that man can do; he cannot annihilate any fact
nor change its nature, and all effort would, therefore, be futile. And,
on the other hand, if evil were known as unreal, then there were no need
of moral effort, no quarrel with the present and therefore no
aspiration, and no achievement. That which is man's highest and
best,--namely, a moral life which is a progress--would thus be
impossible, and his existence would be bereft of all meaning and