re but a triumph's evidence
For the fullness of the days? Have we withered or agonized?
Why else was the pause prolonged but that singing might issue thence?
Why rushed the discords in, but that harmony should be prized?"

Others affirm the self-limitation of God.[30] In His respect for that
human freedom which is the basis of self-regulated personal action and
therefore an essential condition of character, He arrests Himself, as it
were, upon the threshold of human personality and commits His children
to a moral struggle justifying the inevitable incidents of moral defeat
by the greatness of the ends to be attained. A vast deal of what we call
evil--broadening evil to include not only moral defeat but also pain--is
either a consequence or a by-product of what Henry Churchill King calls
the fight for character. Such a solution as this is consistent with the
love of God and the moral order; whether it is consistent with a
thoroughgoing monism or not is another question. William James doubted
it and so frankly adopted Pluralism--which is perhaps just a way of
saying that we cannot reconcile the contending forces in our world order
with one over-all-controlling power--as his solution of the problem.

[Footnote 30: Walker, for example, in his extremely suggestive Spiritual
Monism and Christian Theism.]

Josiah Royce has valiantly maintained, through long and subtle argument,
the goodness of the whole despite the evil of the incidental. "All
finite life is a struggle with evil. Yet from the final point of view
the Whole is good. The Temporal Order contains at no one moment anything
that can satisfy. Yet the Eternal Order is perfect. We have all sinned,
and come short of the glory of God. Yet in just our life, viewed in its
entirety, the glory of God is completely manifest. These hard sayings
are the deepest expressions of the essence of true religion."[31] He
finds the root of evil in the dissatisfaction of the finite will--a
dissatisfaction which on the other hand is the secret of the eventual
triumph of good.

[Footnote 31: "The World and the Individual," Royce, Vol. II, Chap.
9--passim.]

We suffer also through our involution with "the interests and ideals of
vast realms of other conscious and finite lives whose dissatisfactions
become part of each individual man's life when the man concerned cannot
at present see how or why his own ideals are such as to make these
dissatisfactions his fate." We su