Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/295

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THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY.

argument. For we ask: Could not the One create a perfect good save by making good more attractive as set off against the foil evil? Shall we say that Reason could do better than to depend upon this contrast? Then why the evil? If, however, the One Reason could not do better, but had to use the contrast, then the One was less powerful in its devices than is the maker of a concert-programme, who has no need to introduce into his concert any saw-filing or tin-trumpeting or pot-scraping to set off the beauty of his songs and symphonies. But as a fact of experience, is most evil seemingly even thus useful? Are the sick needed to make the healthy joyous? Was Judas necessary in order that Jesus should show himself wholly good? Tradition, in this latter case, says yes, and adds the mystical speech about the need that the offense should come. But what enlightened man nowadays will have it that, supposing good and evil to be separate facts, there can be logically possible nothing thoroughly good, in case some of this evil were removed? Could not Jesus have been what he was without Judas? One doubts here the fact of the necessity of the evil, even in our own little lives; and one is indignant at the trifling that supposes so weak a device as mere external contrast to be the sole device at the disposal of the One Reason. Yet this weak hypothesis of good and evil as externally contrasting separate entities is, after all, provokingly near in form to what we shall hold to be the true solution of the great problem. But that solution is still far away from us and from this world of sense.