in the attempt to
recapitulate so familiar a position. Though I am not a pessimist, I
cannot doubt that there is more plausibility in the doctrine than I
could wish. Moreover, it may be granted that any attempt to explain or
to justify the existence of evil is undeniably futile. It is not so
much that the problem cannot be answered, as that it cannot even be
asked in any intelligible sense. To "explain" a fact is to assign its
causes--that is, to give the preceding set of facts out of which it
arose. However far we might go backwards, we should get no nearer to
perceiving any reason for the original fact. If we explain the fall of
man by Adam's eating the apple, we are quite unable to say why the
apple should have been created. If we could discover a general theory
of pain, showing, say, that it implied certain physiological
conditions, we shall be no nearer to knowing why those physiological
conditions should have been what they are. The existence of pain, in
short, is one of the primary data of our problem, not one of the
accidents, for which we can hope in any intelligible sense to account.
To give any "justification" is equally impossible. The book of Job
really suggests an impossible, one may almost say a meaningless,
problem. We can give an intelligible meaning to a demand for justice
when we can suppose that a man has certain antecedent rights, which
another man may respect or neglect. But this has no meaning as between
the abstraction "nature" and the concrete facts which are themselves
nature. It is unjust to meet equal claims differently. But it is not
"unjust" in any intelligible sense that one being should be a monkey
and another a man, any more than that part of me should be a hand and
another head. The question would only arise if we supposed that the man
and the monkey had existed before they were created, and had then
possessed claims to equal treatment. The most logical theologians,
indeed, admit that as between creature and creator there can be
properly no question of justice. The pot and the potter cannot complain
of each other. If the writer of Job had been able to show that the
virtuous were rewarded and the vicious punished, he would only have
transferred the problem to another issue. The judge might be justified,
but the creator would be condemned. How can it be just to place a being
where he is certain to sin, and then to damn him for sinning? That is
the problem to which no answer can be given;