Robert Browning sang this sturdily through a long generation riding down its difficulties by the sheer force of an unconquerable optimism and subduing argument to lyric passion.
"The evil is null, is naught, is silence implying sound;
What was good shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more;
On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven a perfect round.
"And what is our failure here 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.
[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.
[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 suffer also through our associations with nature, none the less "this very presence of evil in the temporal order is the condition of the perfection of the eternal order." He dismisses definitely, in an argument still to be quoted, the conclusion of the mystic that an "experience of evil is an experience of unreality ... an illusion, a dream, a deceit" and concludes: "In brief, then, nowhere in Time is perfection to be found. Our comfort lies in the knowledge of the Eternal. Strengthened by that knowledge, we can win the most enduring of temporal joys, the consciousness that makes us delight to share the world's grave glories and to take part in its divine sorrows,—sure that these sorrows are the means of the eternal triumph, and that these glories are the treasures of the house of God. When once this comfort comes home to us, we can run and not be weary, and walk and not faint. For our temporal life is the very expression of the eternal triumph."
One may gravely question whether philosophy has ever so completely made out its case as Professor Royce thinks. He is affirming as the reasoned conclusion of philosophy what is rather a faith than a demonstration, but none the less, all honest thinking has hitherto been brave enough to recognize the reality of evil and to test the power of God and His love and goodness not by the actuality of present pain, or the confusion of present sin, but rather by the power which He offers us of growing through pain to health or else so bearing pain as to make it a real contribution to character and of so rising above sin as to make penitence and confession and the struggle for good and the achievement of it also a contribution to character. So St. Paul assures us that all things work together for good for those that love God. "The willingness," says Hocking, "to confront every evil, in ourselves and outside ourselves, with the blunt, factual conscience of Science; willingness to pay the full causal price for the removal of the blemish; this kind of integrity can never be dispensed with in any optimistic program."[32]
[32] "The Meaning of God in Human Experience," p. 175.
Sir Henry Jones takes the same line. "The first requisite for the solution of the contradiction between the demand of religion for the perfection of God, and therefore the final and complete victory of the good in the other, is the honest admission that the contradiction is there, and inevitable; though possibly, like other contradictions, it is there only to be solved."[33]