and an appeal--a confession
of the incompleteness of our answers to the questions suggested by the
fact of evil, and an appeal for patience in recognising that that
incompleteness is inevitable, having regard to our constitutional
limitations. "There is," as Newman said, "a certain grave acquiescence
in ignorance, a recognition of our impotence to solve momentous and
urgent questions, which has a satisfaction of its own." [1] That,
however, is an attitude to which all will not resign themselves. If a
knot cannot be unravelled, their one idea of what to do is to cut it; if
evil cannot be explained, it can at any rate be denied. Thus we find a
distinguished living essayist, with a large constituency of cultured
readers, writing as follows:--

The essence of God's omnipotence is that both law and matter are His and
originate from Him; so that if a single fibre of what we know to be evil
can be found in the world, either God is responsible for that, or He is
{120} dealing with something He did not originate and cannot overcome.
Nothing can extricate us from this dilemma, except that what we think
evil is not really evil at all, but hidden good.

If the views of Divine power and responsibility set forth in this book
are true--if, _i.e._, we are justified in having recourse to a theory of
Divine self-limitation--it will be clear that Mr. Benson's "dilemma" is,
to say the least, overstated; but were that dilemma as desperate as he
depicts it, it has strangely escaped him that his suggested mode of
extrication is more desperate still. For what he asks us to do is quite
simply to abdicate our judgment in respect of both physical and ethical
phenomena--not merely to withhold our decision upon this or that
particular occurrence, but to admit in general terms that evil is only
apparent and not real. But see to what such an admission commits us: if
we have no grounds for saying that evil is evil, we can have no grounds
either for saying that good is good; if our faculties are incompetent to
diagnose the one kind of phenomena accurately, they cannot be any more
competent to diagnose and deliver reliable verdicts upon the other kind.
It is quite a mistake to think that by getting rid of the reality of evil
we preserve or affirm the more emphatically the reality of good; if we
confidently pronounce our experience of evil an illusion, what value can
there attach to our finding that our {121} experience of its opposite is
a fact