And if ye shall say there is no law, ye shall also say there is no sin. If ye shall say there is no sin, ye shall also say there is no righteousness. And if there be no righteousness, there is no happiness. And if there be no righteousness nor happiness, there be no punishment nor misery. And if these things are not there is no God. And if there is no God, we are not, neither the earth: for there could have been no creation of things; neither to act nor to be acted upon, wherefore, all things must have vanished away.[[52]]
This may be regarded as a very bold setting forth of the doctrine of antinomies, and yet I think the logic of it, and the inevitableness of the conclusion unassailable. In his work, "Origin and Development of Religious Beliefs" S. Baring-Gould says:
The world presents us with a picture of unity and distinction; unity without uniformity, and distinction without antagonism. * * * Everywhere, around us and within us, we see that radical antinomy. The whole astronomic order resolves itself into attraction and repulsion—a centripetal and a centrifugal force; the chemical order into the antinomy of positive and negative electricity, decomposing substances and recomposing them. The whole visible universe presents the antinomy of light and darkness, movement and repose, force and matter, heat and cold, the one and the multiple. The order of life is resumed in the antinomy of the individual and the species, the particular and the general; the order of our sentiments in that of happiness and sorrow, pleasure and pain; that of our conceptions in the antinomy of the ideal and the real; that of our will in the conditions of activity and passivity.[[53]]
The existence of evil in the world has ever been a vexed problem for both theologians and philosophers, and has led to the wildest speculations imaginable. It will be sufficient here, however, if I note the recognition by high authority of the difficulties involved in the problem. Of those who have felt and expressed these difficulties, I know of no one who has done so in better terms than Henry L. Mansel in his contribution to the celebrated course of "Bampton Lecturers," in "The Limits of Religious Thought" (1858), in the course of which he says:
The real riddle of existence—the problem which confounds all philosophy, aye, and all religion, too, so far as religion is a thing of man's reason, is the fact that evil exists at all; not that it exists for a longer or a shorter duration. Is not God infinitely wise and holy and powerful now? and does not sin exist along with that infinite holiness and wisdom and power? Is God to become more holy, more wise, more powerful hereafter; and must evil be annihilated to make room for his perfections to expand? Does the infinity of his eternal nature ebb and flow with every increase or diminution in the sum of human guilt and misery? Against this immovable barrier of the existence of evil, the waves of philosophy have dashed themselves unceasingly since the birthday of human thought, and have retired broken and powerless, without displacing the minutest fragment of the stubborn rock, without softening one feature of its dark and rugged surface.[[54]]
This writer then proceeds by plain implication to make it clear that religion no more than philosophy has solved the problem of the existence of evil:
But this mystery [i. e., the existence of evil], vast and inscrutable as it is, is but one aspect of a more general problem; it is but the moral form of the ever-recurring secret of the Infinite. How the Infinite and the finite, in any form of antagonism or other relation, can exist together; how infinite power can coexist with finite activity; how infinite wisdom can coexist with finite contingency; how infinite goodnesss can coexist with finite evil; how the Infinite can exist in any manner without exhausting the universe of reality—this is the riddle which Infinite Wisdom alone can solve, the problem whose very conception belongs only to that Universal Knowledge which fills and embraces the Universe of Being.[[55]]
In the presence of these reflections it cannot be doubted, then, that the existence of moral evil is one of the world's serious difficulties; and any solution which the Book of Mormon may give of it that is really helpful, will be a valuable contribution to the world's enlightenment, a real revelation—a ray of light from the "inner fact of things." Let us consider if it does this.
In view of the utterances of the Book of Mormon already quoted I am justified in saying that evil as well as good is among the eternal things. Its existence did not begin with its appearance on our earth. Evil existed even in heaven; for Lucifer and many other spirits sinned there; "rebelled against heaven's matchless King," waged war, and were thrust out into the earth for their transgression.[[56]]
Evil is not a created quality.[[57]] It has always existed as the back ground of good. It is as eternal as goodnesss; it is as eternal as law; it is as eternal as the agency of intelligence. Sin, which is evil active, is transgression of law;[[58]] and so long as the agency of intelligences and law have existed, the possibility of the transgression of law has existed; and as the agency of intelligences and law have eternally existed, so, too, evil has existed eternally, either potentially or active and will always so exist.