THERE never was, never can be a more fatuous undertaking than that upon which men enter when they essay to fool themselves by trying, in some one thing, to evade the requirements of the simple, straightforward logic which they unhesitatingly recognize and act upon in other things. Upon inquiry respecting the matter, the average Christian believer will aver that God is the source of all real being, and that He is wholly good. The unquestionable conclusion to be drawn from these premises is that evil, if real as the senses declare, has its place in God's kingdom, is the manifestation of good! However startling this conclusion, there is no possible way of escaping it if we accept the premises named. Though the asserted necessity and consequent worth of evil be practically denied in the universal effort to escape its penalties, if it were an essential part of the divine plan for our educational development, such denial can be made only at the sacrifice of logical thought, hence of the self-respect of those who dare to face the issue, since they must realize that they have allied themselves not with truth-seekers but with truth-dodgers.
Now and then there has come upon the scene one who was incapable of this kind of self-jugglery, and it was just here that John Fiske made himself conspicuous. He accepted our Lord's teaching, that God is perfect and that He is the one infinite cause. Accepting further the testimony of the senses as to the reality of material substance and of evil, he dared to maintain the logical outcome of these two premises and to declare that "God is the creator of evil." In his study of the mystery of evil, he expands and elucidates the proposition that without knowing the bad we could not know the good; that "in a moral world it [evil] is indispensable;" thus making it appear that the command, "But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it," should be regarded not as an expression of moral law, or the divine will, but of the ignorance of an ancient chronicler, from which the spiritually awakened ought to find escape.
While Mr. Fiske was thus settling this vexed question to his own satisfaction, another equally daring thinker was reaching an entirely different conclusion, upon which she founded a system of religious teaching and practise that is astonishing the world with its beneficent achievements. Mrs. Eddy also accepted the Scripture teaching that God is the only cause and creator, and that He is wholly good; but from these premises she reached the conclusion that evil can have no real existence, and is therefore a falsity and a deceit in its every claim, even as Christ Jesus declared, when he said of the devil, "He is a liar, and the father of it." She realized that the belief in the reality of evil is opposed to the ideality of the divine nature, since the Scripture identifies it with ignorance of divine law, or with wilful disobedience thereto, and Christ Jesus expressly stated that those who consent to or indulge moral wrong are not the children of God but of the devil.
