than with one
which insists upon His indwelling in creation. If the earth was the
scene and playground of undivine agencies which work their will while
the Divine control is withdrawn, then many things became comparatively
easy of comprehension; indeed, there was a certain consolation in the
thought that--

All the things that had been so wrong
After all would not last for long,

{88} but that ultimately God would resume the supreme control He had
temporarily abandoned, while the Power of darkness would be bound and
cast into the abyss. If, however, we must think of Him as omnipresent
and for that reason directly and uninterruptedly cognisant of all, then
the plain man can only ask himself with a deepening wonder why an
all-good and unimaginably powerful Being should permit evils of every
description to lay waste His own creation. "No one can enter into the
house of the strong, and spoil his goods, except he first bind the
strong"; and since a direct overpowering of God by Satan is out of the
question, is not the assumption to which we are driven this--that the
Strong One is absent while His goods are being spoiled, and that it is
this very absence of which the spoiler has taken advantage? Somehow,
we feel, if He were really present--as present as the doctrine of
immanence would have us believe--He would actively assert Himself
against wrongs and abuses; and when we think of the blood and tears
that are shed the world over as the result of disordered desire,
industrial greed and political misrule, we find it difficult not to
echo the words of psalmist and prophet, "Why standest Thou afar off, O
Lord? Why hidest Thou Thyself in times of trouble?" "Verily Thou art
a God that hidest Thyself."

In saying this we do not suggest that such an attempt to explain the
phenomena of evil {89} by God's supposed absence from the world is
defensible; we do say that the belief in His all-encompassing nearness
makes those phenomena even more difficult of explanation than they were
before. The devout deist could always comfort himself with the thought
that, however mysterious God's standing afar off might be, by and by,
when He drew nigh again, He would deal out even-handed justice to all;
but such comfort is not open to those who explicitly deny God's
remoteness, but on the contrary assert that He is the Presence from
which there is no escaping. And the fact of evil, physical and moral,
is precisely the chief and most fr