Who saith a whole I planned,
Youth shows but half: trust God, see all, nor be afraid.”
The contrast between good and evil can be well illustrated by the contrast between heat and cold. Cold is only the absence of heat, and is made at once possible and necessary by the existence of degrees of heat. The fact that we regard excessive cold as an evil is only because our organisation demands a certain temperature for life; there is nothing evil about cold in itself: it is only evil in its relation to organisms sufficiently high to be damaged by it. The real fact is their normally high temperature, and their delicacy of response to stimuli. These things are good; and the only evil is a defect or deficiency of these good things.
Every rise involves the possibility of fall. Every advance seems to entail a corresponding penalty.
The power of assimilating food leaves the organism open to the pangs of hunger, that is, of insufficient nutriment,—manifestly only the absence of a good.
In a world devoid of life there is no death; in a world without conscious beings there is no sin. In a world without affection there would be no grief; and to a larger vision much of our grief may be needless:—
“My son, the world is dark with griefs and graves,
So dark that men cry out against the Heavens.
Who knows but that the darkness is in man?”
A mechanical universe might be perfectly good. Every atom of matter perfectly obeys the forces acting upon it, and there is no error or wickedness or fault or rebellion in lifeless nature. Evil only begins when existence takes a higher turn. There is not even destruction or death in the inorganic world—only transformation. The higher possibility called life entails the correlative evils called death and disease. The possibility of keen sensation, which permits pleasure, also involves capacity for the corresponding penalty called pain: but the pain is in ourselves, and is the result of our sensitiveness combined with imperfection.