f attacks that are being made to-day from
quarter after quarter, all of them converging upon the same point. Now
the cry is raised that sin is a mere mistake, due to ignorance; or that
it is merely the absence of something, as a shadow indicates the absence
of light[1]; or we are assured that "what we call 'evil' is only
incidental to the progress and development of the [universal] order"
[2]--a necessary step in evolution. Now again the burden of
responsibility is shifted from the shoulders of the individual on to
heredity and environment; or compromise with what is known to be moral
evil is not only excused as a necessity, but commended as a duty; or the
average person's feelings are considerately soothed by {142} the
pronouncement that "the mass of a Christian congregation are about as
innocent as men and women can well be in a world where natural
temptations are so rife, and so many social adjustments discountenance
heroic saintliness" [3]--the latter a truly admirable feat of
circumlocution. And sometimes, as we have seen, sin and evil are
themselves in essence negated--generally in virtue of some
pseudo-philosophic or pseudo-scientific "doctrine of a universe"--as when
we read that "in a universe . . . there cannot be any room for
independent and creative wills, actually thwarting the Good Will." [4]
Doubtless, these various statements, whether made in the name of Monism
or Determinism, or some form of neo-Christianity, represent a reaction
against that over-emphasis which taught that man was by nature under
God's wrath and deserving of everlasting torments; but there can be no
question that this reaction has gone very far in the direction of the
opposite extreme, and that the time has come for reconsideration and a
return to more balanced views.

So far as the virtual denial of human freedom, human sin, and indeed of
human selfhood, {143} flows from a perversion of the doctrine of Divine
immanence, we need not add anything to the observations made in earlier
chapters upon this subject; we might, however, quote some pertinent words
of Martineau's, affirming and explaining that distinction between the
Divine and human personality which can only be ignored to the hopeless
confusion of thought:

"The whole external universe, then (external, I mean, to self-conscious
beings), we unreservedly surrender to the Indwelling Will, of which it is
the organised expression. From no point of its space, from no moment of