e
there has come to us a parallel revelation of undreamt-of good. I must
bear witness to my conviction that we are beholding a tremendous inrush
or uprush of good into man and his world. But what I wish to dwell upon
is the growing and ever-confirmed revelation of an intimate relation or
connexion between the two which is the very spring of Progress, viz.
that the supply of good is not only adequate and more than adequate to
the utmost demand made upon it, in the combating of the evil, and that
for this reason, that while on the one hand the evil that impedes or
counter-works the good is itself of spiritual origin, its existence and
power is conditioned by the law that it must evoke and stimulate the
very power which it attempts to crush and defeat. This is, as I have
said, the now discovered and known spring of Progress both within and
without us, that whatsoever is evil, evil just because it is enacted and
does not merely occur, passes within the reach of knowledge and
understanding, and in the measure that it passes into the light, not
merely loses its sting and its force, but is convertible and converted
into a strengthening condition of that which in its first appearance it
seemed merely to thwart. Even regress is seen to be a necessary incident
in progress, and the seasons which we call periods of decadence to be
occasions in which the spirit progresses in secret, recruiting itself
not by idleness or rest, but genuinely refreshing and recreating itself.

The view here suggested is no sentimental optimism. The drama of the
universe is no comedy or even melodrama, but a tragedy or epic of
heroism, and more especially is this the character of the history of the
spirit which is in Man and is Man. The evil we enact is real evil, the
only real evil, the checks which our disobedience or disloyalty imposes
upon the course of good, are genuine retardations or frustrations;
nevertheless they are not wholly evil, for nothing is such, but are the
means which the spirit that has begotten them, utilizes in its eternal
Progress and wins out of them a richness, a complex and varied harmony
to which they are compelled to contribute. Our ideal of action must
therefore in principle acknowledge as essential, what I have called the
'tragic' character suggested by the spectacle of the war, the fear and
agony which we imagine in Nature and comprehendingly discern in human
history. The Progress which we can achieve or contribute to--which