nd
wonder why his omnipotence does not make it effective. One thus
begins, as it were, to try heroically to do the absent God's work for
him.

All these are familiar experiences. They find us, too often,
unprepared. They find us when emotion tends to cloud every insight.
They illustrate a certain dialectical process which belongs to all
human life and which plays its part in the whole history of religion.
Perhaps it is well to state an aspect of this dialectical process
abstractly, crabbedly, and unemotionally, as we have just done, in
order that we may make ourselves the more ready to face the issue when
life exemplifies it with crushing suddenness, and when

"The painful ploughshare of passion
Grinds down to our uttermost rock."

The problem, as just abstractly stated, is this. Religion seems to
face this dilemma: Either there are no great and essential ills about
human life; {231} and then there is no great danger of perdition, and
no great need of salvation, and religion has no notable office; or
there are great and essential ills, and man's life is in bitter need
of salvation; but in that case evil is deeply rooted in the very
nature of the reality from which we have sprung; and therefore
religion has no right to assure us of communion with a real master of
life who is able to do with evil what not only ought to be done with
it, but ought always to have been done with it by any being able to
offer man any genuine salvation. For (as we are assuming) what ought
to be done, yes, what ought to have been done with evil from the
beginning, is and was this: To banish it altogether from existence.

This, I say, is, when abstractly stated, the dilemma in which religion
seems to be placed. Of this dilemma the countless struggles of the
human soul when, in the spirit of some practical religion, it seeks
for salvation and faces its woes are examples. These struggles are
infinitely pathetic and in life are often confusing to insight. Is
there any value in considering this abstract statement of the
principles upon which this dilemma seems to be founded? Possibly there
is, if we can hereby be led also to consider--not indeed, in this
place, the problems of theology, or the metaphysics of evil, but a new
source of insight.

{232}

IV

This new source of insight begins to come to us when we observe, as we
can often observe if we listen with closer attention to the voices of
our own hearts