doctrine of
Creation. For only with the existence of creatures does Time thus arise
at all--it exists only in and through them. And assuredly all finite
things, that we know at all, bear traces of a history involving a
beginning and an end. Professor Bernardino Varisco, in his great _Know
Thyself_, has noble pages on this large theme.[52] In any case we must
beware of all more or less Pantheistic conceptions of the simultaneous
life of God and the successive life of creatures as but essential and
necessary elements of one single Divine-Creaturely existence, in the
manner, e.g., of Professor Josiah Royce, in his powerful work _The World
and the Individual_, 2nd series, 1901. All such schemes break down under
an adequate realization of those dread facts error and evil. A certain
real independence must have been left by God to reasonable creatures.
And let it be noted carefully: the great difficulty against all Theism
lies in the terrible reality of Evil; and the deepest adequacy of this
same Theism, especially of Christianity, consists in its practical
attitude towards, and success against, this most real Evil. But
Pantheism increases, whilst seeming to surmount, the theoretical
difficulty, since the world as it stands, and not an Ultimate Reality
behind it, is held to be perfect; and it entirely fails really to
transmute Evil in practice. Theism, no more than any other outlook,
really explains Evil; but it alone, in its fullest, Jewish-Christian
forms, has done more, and better, than explain Evil: it has fully faced,
it has indeed greatly intensified, the problem, by its noble insistence
upon the reality and heinousness of Sin; and it has then overcome all
this Evil, not indeed in theory, but in practice, by actually producing
in the midst of deep suffering, through a still deeper faith and love,
souls the living expression of the deepest beatitude and peace.

The fully Simultaneous Reality awakens and satisfies man's deepest, most
nearly simultaneous life, by a certain adaptation of its own intrinsic
life to these human spirits. In such varyingly 'incarnational' acts or
action the non-successive God Himself condescends to a certain
successiveness; but this, in order to help His creatures to achieve as
much simultaneity as is compatible with their several ranks and calls.
We must not wonder if, in the religious literature, these condescensions
of God largely appear as though they themselves were more or less
non-successi