The still higher attribute of conscious striving after holiness, which must be the prerogative of free agents capable of virtue or purposed good, and marks so enormous a rise in the scale of creation,—involves the possibility that beings so endowed may fall from their high level, and, by definitely applying themselves to harm instead of good, may abuse their high power and suffer the penalty called sin; but the evil in all cases is a warped or distorted good, and has reference to the higher beings which are now in existence.
“There shall never be one lost good! what was shall live as before;
The evil is null, is nought, 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.”
Some further idea of the necessity for evil can be conveyed as follows:—
Contrast is an inevitable attribute of reality. Sickness is the negative and opposite of health: without sickness we should not be aware what health was. There is no sickness in inorganic nature; yet, even there, contrast is the essence of existence. Everything that is must be surrounded by regions where it is not. There is no stupid infinity, or absence of boundaries, about existing things,—however infinite their totality may be,—no absence of limitation, either of perfection or of anything else. Existence involves limitation. A tree that is here is excluded from being everywhere else. Goodness would have no meaning if badness were impossible or non-existent.
“No ill no good! such counter-terms, my son,
Are border-races, holding, each its own
By endless war.”