unless evil is a reality, and a deep-rooted one. But,
on the other hand, if evil is thus deep-rooted in the very {227}
conditions of human life as they are, and if it persists upon higher
levels even of the religious life, religion seems in danger of total
failure. For unless goodness is somehow at the real heart of
things--is, so to speak, the core of reality--the hope of salvation is
a dream, and religion deceives us. But goodness, by the hypothesis
that we are just now considering, requires that evil should be wholly
abolished. How can that which should not exist at all, namely, evil,
be in such wise the expression of the real nature of things that on
the one hand religion is needed to save us from evil, and yet is able
to do so only by bringing us to know that the real nature of things is
good? Here is our problem. And it is a hard one.

In brief, as you may say, religion must take its choice. Either the
evil in the world is of no great importance, and then religion is
useless; or the need of salvation is great, and the way is straight
and narrow; and then evil is deeply rooted in the very nature of
reality, and religion seems a failure.

III

I believe that there is some advantage in stating in this somewhat
crabbed and dialectical fashion, a problem which most of us usually
approach through much more direct and pathetic experience. One
advantage in crabbedness and in fondness for dialectic is that it
sometimes tends to clear away the clouds {228} with which emotion from
moment to moment surrounds certain great problems of life. As I said
earlier, in speaking of the office of the reason, abstract ideas are
but means to an end. Their end is to help us to a clear and rational
survey of the connections of things. When you are to examine the
landscape from a height, in order to obtain a wide prospect, you may
have to use a glass, or a compass, or some other instrument of
abstraction, in order to define what the distance tends to render
obscure, or what the manifoldness of the scenery surveyed makes it
hard rightly to view in its true relations. And, in such cases, the
glass or the compass is but an auxiliary, intended to help in the end
your whole outlook. Now the world of good and evil is a world of wide
prospects, of vast distances, of manifold features. A bit of
dialectics, using abstract and one-sided considerations in succession,
may prepare the way for seeing the whole better.