out of existence," proves to be a palpable falsity. As our knowledge
of such ills grows clearer, we commonly find that there is, indeed,
something about them, as they at any one moment appear to us, which
ought, indeed, to be annulled, set aside, destroyed. But this
annulling of one momentary or at least transient aspect of the ill is
but part, in such cases, of a constructive process, which involves
growth rather than destruction--a passage to a new life rather than a
casting wholly out of life. Such ills we remove only in so far as we
assimilate them, idealise them, take them up into the plan of our
lives, give them meaning, set them in their place in the whole.

Now such ills, as I must insist, play a very great part in life and
especially in the higher life. Our {236} attitude toward them
constitutes, above all, on the very highest levels of our
reasonableness, a very great part of our attitude toward the whole
problem of life. In the presence of these idealised evils, man the
destroyer becomes transformed into man the creator. And he does so
without in the least abandoning his justified moral distinctions,
without indulging in any sort of "moral holiday," and without becoming
unwilling to destroy when he cannot otherwise rationally face the
facts before him than by destroying. He is not less strenuous in his
dealing with his moral situation because he has discovered how to
substitute growth for destruction and creative assimilation for barren
hostility. He is all the more effectively loyal in the presence of
such ills, because he sees how they can become, for his consciousness,
parts of a good whole.

Ills of this sort may become, and in the better cases do become,
sources of religious insight. Their presence in our world enables us
the better to comprehend its spiritual unity. And because they are
often very deep and tragic ills, which we face only with very deep and
dear travail of spirit, they hint to us how, from the point of view of
a world-embracing insight, the countless and terrible ills of the
other sort, which we _cannot_ now understand, and which, at present,
appear to us merely as worthy of utter destruction, may still also
have their places, as stages and phases of expression, in the larger
life to which we belong. In our own power to assimilate {237} and
spiritualise our own ills, we can get at times a hint of such larger
spiritual processes. In these very processes we also, through our
loyal endea