h gin
Beset the Road I was to wander in,
Thou wilt not with Predestin'd Evil round
Enmesh, and then impute my Fall to Sin!

O Thou, who man of baser Earth didst make,
And ev'n with Paradise devise the Snake:
For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man
Is blacken'd--Man's forgiveness give--and take!

It is only when we clearly recognise that man is other than a mere
phase or mode of the one Eternal Being; that he has been endowed with
individual existence and individual will, and therefore with individual
responsibility--and that for the express purpose of realising his
highest potentialities: it is only when we accept such a reading of the
facts as this that we escape from that worst of nightmares which
reaches its climax in hurling its foolish defiance at the Most High,
challenging His right to punish the instruments of His own will, those
"helpless pieces of the game He plays," impotent items in that unending
spectacle--

Which for the pastime of Eternity
He doth Himself contrive, enact, behold.

But if it is true that God bestowed freedom upon us because only as
free agents could we learn to love and do the right for its own sake;
if it is true that the struggle which we have to wage against our lower
impulses has the wholly benevolent object of enabling us to achieve the
glory of a perfected character, it has also to be borne in mind that
under no {103} circumstances can character be conceived otherwise than
as the "result" of growth. That is to say, God Himself could not call
moral perfection into being ready-made, by a mere _fiat_, and that for
the same reason which precludes omnipotence itself from making two
straight lines to enclose a space, _i.e._, because the idea involves a
self-contradiction. So true is this that we read even of our Saviour
that "though He was a Son, yet He learned obedience by the things which
He suffered," and in this manner was "made perfect." Character in its
very definition is the result of many deliberate exercises of a free
will; and if the evolution of character was an object dearer to God
than the highest mechanical or animal perfection, that object could
have been secured in no other way than by this particular endowment.

And here we shall also find the reply to the very natural inquiry why
God does not, as He might, intervene or frustrate the evil designs of
wrong-doers. Why does a good God allow His intentions to be set at
defiance by those w