"With Cardinal Newman, one of the glories of our age, Hâjî Abdû finds 'the Light of the world nothing else than the Prophet's scroll, full of lamentations and mourning and woe.' I cannot refrain from quoting all this fine passage, if it be only for the sake of its lame and shallow deduction. 'To consider the world in its length and breadth, its various history and the many races of men, their starts, their fortunes, their mutual alienation, their conflicts, and then their ways, habits, governments, forms of worship; their enterprises, their aimless courses, their random achievements and acquirements, the impotent conclusion of long-standing facts, the tokens so faint and broken of a superintending design, the blind evolution (!) of what turn out to be great powers or truths, the progress of things as if from unreasoning elements, not towards final causes; the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims and short duration, the curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion, that condition of the whole race so fearfully yet exactly described in the Apostle's words, "having no hope and without God in the world"—all this is a vision to dizzy and appal, and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery which is absolutely without human solution.' Hence that admirable writer postulates some 'terrible original calamity;' and thus the hateful doctrine, theologically called 'original sin,' becomes to him almost as certain as that 'the world exists, and as the existence of God.' Similarly the 'Schedule of Doctrines' of the most liberal Christian Church insists upon human depravity, and the 'absolute need of the Holy Spirit's agency in man's regeneration and sanctification.'
"But what have we here? The 'original calamity' was either caused by God or arose without leave of God, in either case degrading God to man. It is the old dilemma whose horns are the irreconcilable attributes of goodness and omniscience in the supposed Creator of sin and suffering. If the one quality be predicable, the other cannot be predicable of the same subject. Far better and wiser is the essayist's poetical explanation, now apparently despised because it was the fashionable doctrine of the sage bard's day—
'All nature is but art . . .
All discord harmony not understood;
All partial evil universal good.'
——(Essay, 289-292.)
The Pilgrim holds with St. Augustine Absolute Evil is impossible because it is always rising up into good. He considers the theory of a beneficent or maleficent deity a purely sentimental fancy, contradicted by human reason and the aspect of the world. Evil is often the active form of good; as F. W. Newman says, 'so likewise is Evil the revelation of Good.' With him all existences are equal: so long as they possess the Hindú Agasa, Life-fluid or vital force, it matters not they be
'Fungus or oak or worm or man.'
War, he says, brings about countless individual miseries, but it forwards general progress by raising the stronger upon the ruins of the weaker races. Earthquakes and cyclones ravage small areas; but the former builds up earth for man's habitation, and the latter renders the atmosphere fit for him to breathe. Hence he echoes—
'—The universal Cause
Acts not by partial but by general laws.'
Ancillary to the churchman's immoral view of 'original sin' is the unscientific theory that evil came into the world with Adam and his seed. Let us ask what was the state of our globe in the pre-Adamite days, when the tyrants of the Earth, the huge Saurians and other monsters lived in perpetual strife, in a destructiveness of which we have now only the feeblest examples? What is the actual state of the world of waters, where the only object of life is death, where the Law of murder is the Law of Development?
"Some will charge the Hâjî with irreverence, and hold him a 'lieutenant of Satan who sits in the chair of pestilence.' But he is not intentionally irreverent. Like men of far higher strain, who deny divinely the divine, he speaks the things that others think and hide. With the author of 'Supernatural Religion,' he holds that we 'gain infinitely more than we lose in abandoning belief in the reality of revelation;' and he looks forward to the day when 'the old tyranny shall have been broken, and when the anarchy of transition shall have passed away.' But he is an Eastern. When he repeats the Greek's 'Remember not to believe,' he means, Strive to learn, to know, for right ideas lead to right actions. Among the couplets not translated for this eclogue is—
'Of all the safest ways of Life the safest way is still to doubt;
Men win the future world with Faith, the present world they win without.'