Ground of Things, whether conceived of as conscious or as unknowable, responsible for all that is in life, the evil as well as the good. And the utterly intimate intermingling of the First Cause with all of its effects soever, which these monistic systems all imply, and which some of them frankly maintain, renders this responsibility so direct and complete as to shock all our ideal sensibilities and make reverence for such a Being, vast and mighty as the Being may be, quite impossible, — even reverence, not to speak of adoring devotion. How can we revere that which consciously produces or permits uncontrolled evil, even on the pretence that it is done for eventual good? How worship that which sins in and with us, even if this sinning be for ultimate universal penitence and amendment? Or how can we commit our guidance, devoutly, to that of which we cannot say whether it is conscious or unconscious, and into whose counsels, or whose drift, if perchance it have any, we cannot possibly penetrate? It is condemnation, not recommendation of these systems, to any moral mind, when their advocates declare, as sometimes they do, that “the God of things as they are is the God of things as they ought to be.” A mind heartily moral knows better, when the poet, however plausibly, declares that “whatever is is right.” As moral beings, we know that much which is is wrong, and is in no way palliable, or even to be tolerated, by a good being; yes, that our whole business with it is simply to get rid of it, and to bring on a state of the world in which it shall no longer have room to exist.
This same responsibility for evil, even for sin, is also carried back upon God by the systems in our first group. The predestinating Sovereign, the universal Maker, cannot escape the contagion of the evil and the wickedness that pervades the world which he creates and from moment to moment sustains. Even the natural evil in the world, however regarded as a means of greater good, is so extensively administered with a reckless hand, absolutely regardless of the
