He must be reckoned a daring man who denies the reality of matter and yet asserts the reality of evil, for the logic of the situation leads to the inevitable inclusion of evil in the divine consciousness, and thus involves some startling contradictions. For example, if the one infinite Mind embraces evil it must embrace all that evil entails including death. (James, 1 : 15.) But God surely never died, and He neither has had nor can have any fear or anticipation of death, or the antecedent sickness and suffering which lead thereto. If therefore He has no consciousness of these things in Himself, how can he possibly have any consciousness of them in man, His child, whose very being is constituted in and by the divine knowing?
So long as the reality of matter is maintained, there is something assumed besides God to which evil and its sequence of suffering and strife may be attached, but to deny the reality of matter and yet assert the reality of evil, involves the would-be idealist in the sacrifice of a self-consistent concept of the divine nature. Nevertheless there are those who unhesitatingly Seem to accept this position with all it includes.
In the Gifford Lectures delivered by a well-known American professor before the University of Aberdeen, we find the following remarkable paragraph in evidence:—
