"Repel my descent: by hate taught love.
Oh, gain were indeed to see above
Supremacy ever—to move, remove,
"Not reach—aspire yet never attain
To the object aimed at."A
A: Rephan—Asolando.
He who places rest above effort, Rephan above the earth, places a natural good above a moral good, stagnation above progress. The demand for the absolute extinction of evil betrays ignorance of the nature of the highest good. For right and wrong are relative. "Type need antitype." The fact that goodness is best, and that goodness is not a stagnant state but a progress, a gradual realization, though never complete, of an infinite ideal, of the perfection of God by a finite being, necessarily implies the consciousness of sin and evil. As a moral agent man must set what should be above what is. If he is to aspire and attain, the actual present must seem to him inadequate, imperfect, wrong, a state to be abolished in favour of a better. And therefore it follows that
"Though wrong were right
Could we but know—still wrong must needs seem wrong
To do right's service, prove men weak or strong,