in all their blackness, they can be, and
are, sources of moral enthusiasm and earnestness. Man the destroyer,
when, awaking to the presence of such ills in his world, he contends
with them, gets a perfectly {234} definite moral content into his
life. And he has his right to do so. Whatever his religion, he is
morally authorised to labour against these unmediated evils with the
heartiest intolerance. When such labour takes on social forms, it
helps toward the loftiest humanity. The war with pain and disease and
oppression, the effort to bind up wounds and to snatch souls from
destruction--all these things constitute some of man's greatest
opportunities for loyalty. Nevertheless, when man loyally wars with
the ills such as physical anguish and pestilence and famine and
oppression, he does not thereby tend to discover, through his own
loyal act, why such individual ills are permitted in the world. In so
far as these evils give him opportunity for service, they appeal to
his loyalty as a warrior against them. If his cause includes, for him,
activities that enter into this warfare with ills that are to be
destroyed, these ills have thus indirectly conduced to his religious
life. But it is his loyalty that in such cases is his source of
religious insight. The ills themselves that he thus destructively
fights remain to him as opaque as before. Why they find their place in
the world he does not see. Now that they are found there, he knows
what to do with them--namely, to annul them, to put them out of
existence, as a part of his loyal service. But if he is religiously
minded, he does not for a moment conceive that the ills with which he
wars are there simply to give him the opportunity for his service. So
far then it is, indeed. {235} true that the ills which we have simply
to destroy offer us no source of religious insight.

But now, as I must insist, _not all_ the ills that we know are of this
nature. Wide and deep and terrible as are those conflicts with the
incomprehensible ills of fortune whose presence in the world we do not
understand, there are other ills. And toward these other ills we take
an attitude which is not wholly destructive. We find them, upon a
closer view, inseparably bound up with good--so closely bound up
therewith that we could not conceive a life wherein this sort of good
which is here bound up with this sort of ill could be separated
therefrom. In these cases the principle: "Evil should be simply put