Religio Doctoris

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: IV THE PROBLEM OF EVIL This world's no blot for us, Nor blank; it means intensely and means good: To find its meaning is my meat and drink. Robert Browning All the world's thinkers that have ever seriously tried to understand the wonderful world of which we Evil is are a part, have had to ponder over the...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: IV THE PROBLEM OF EVIL This world's no blot for us, Nor blank; it means intensely and means good: To find its meaning is my meat and drink. Robert Browning All the world's thinkers that have ever seriously tried to understand the wonderful world of which we Evil is are a part, have had to ponder over the imperfection. problem of evy. and the thought expended upon this subject has not been without result. With more or less clearness it is beginning to be perceived that evil is not a positive malignant force (as seems at one time to have been believed), but that it is merely negative, ?that evil is but another aspect of imperfection. This is a truth so simple that it has gained wide acceptance; and yet the relation of this truth to others, its many important corollaries, its bearing upon the conduct of life, upon the ethical ideas that men should set before themselves and the practical ends for which they should work, are generally so little considered that it may well be worth while to dwell upon this truth at some length; and I am the more strongly impelled to invite the attention of others to the implications contained in this interpretation of evil, because their consideration has done so much to make my own life happier and more serene, ?going far toward banishing hate from my life, widening my sympathies, and giving me the patience in the presence of individual evils that comes from the recognition of their temporary necessity and confidence in their ultimate disappearance. The recognition of evil as incidental to imperfection, in the sense of incompleteness, means, for one thing, that notwithstanding the potential loveli- Man suffers ness anl actual beauty of the world, life has so much of ugliness, physical and moral, not because of ma.