Article August 12, 1905 Issue

Evil without Excuse

SAMUEL GREENWOOD.

THOSE who have advanced the theory that evil is "undeveloped good," or that it is "good in the making," have not enlightened us as to the probable time required to complete the process. Sixty centuries have already been recorded since evil, according to popular belief, began its dominion over mankind. The number may be six hundred, and yet there has been no discernible change for the better in the original product. Imagination might continue with the course of evil to the end of time without detecting the first sign that hate could evolve a single grain of love, or that venomous envy could transform itself into sweet charity. There is no case on record of an individual's becoming righteous by any other means than the forsaking of sin, and this leaves mortals scant ground for expectation that they can ever gain goodness in any other way.

While the proposition that evil is a sort of spiritual protoplasm out of which good is eventually made, is much too grotesque to be taken seriously, it illustrates the shifts mortals make in finding excuses for the existence of evil. No apology that has ever been offered has lessened the vileness of its nature, nor made of it anything better than it is, the would-be destroyer of man's godlikeness. To have repudiated it in the first instance, in the name of the infinite creator, had been wise and true; but to associate its introduction into human experience with the name of God, who made all things good, is the extreme of blasphemy.

The ancient traditions regarding creation, which human enlightenment has discarded, are quite as reasonable as the alleged metamorphosis of an angel into a devil. Yet those who would resent the former as an insult to their intelligence will advance the latter belief in all seriousness, notwithstanding its implication of God in the subsequent perpetration of evil upon mankind. Every good quality in human nature recoils from the belief that God permitted His children to be victimized by a demon, and then turned over their descendants to its diabolical rule. The human father who did thus with his children would be abhorred by his fellows, a fact which should effectually blot out the charge of God's participation in the supposed advent of evil.

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