“What we call Evil, you mean, is nothing but appearance.”

“Yes.”

“You think, in fact, with the poet, that ’all that is, is good’?”

“Yes,” he replied, “all that really is.”

“Ah!” I said, “but in that ‘really’ lies the crux of the matter.  Take, for instance, a simple fact of our own experience—­pain.  Would you say, perhaps, that pain is good?”

“No,” he replied, “not as it appears to us; but as it really is.”

“As it really is to whom, or in whom?”

“To the Absolute, we will say; to God, if you like.”

“Well, but what is the relation of the pain as it is in God to the pain that appears to us?”

“I don’t pretend to know,” he said, “but that is hardly the point.  The point is, that it is only in connection with what is in God that the word Good has any real meaning.  Appearance is neither good nor bad; it is simply not real.”

“But,” cried Audubon, interrupting in a kind of passion, “It is in appearance that we live and move and have our being.  What is the use of saying that appearance is neither good nor bad, when we are feeling it as the one or the other every moment of our lives?  And as to the Good that is in God, who knows or cares about it?  What consolation is it to me when I am suffering from the toothache, to be told that God is enjoying the pain that tortures me?  It is simply absurd to call God’s Good good at all, unless it has some kind of relation to our Good.”

“Well,” said Dennis, “as to that, I can only say that, in my opinion, it is nothing but our weakness that leads us to take such a view.  When I am really at my best, when my intellect and imagination are working freely, and the humours and passions of the flesh are laid to rest, I seem to see, with a kind of direct intuition, that the world, just as it is, is good, and that it is only the confusion and obscurity due to imperfect vision that makes us call it defective and wish to alter it for the better.  When I perceive Truth at all, I perceive that it is also Good; and I cannot then distinguish between what is, and what ought to be.”

“Really,” cried Audubon, “really?  Well, that I cannot understand.”

“I hardly know how to make it clear,” he replied, “unless it were by a concrete example.  I find that when I think out any particular aspect of things, so far, that is to say, as I can think it out at all, all the parts and details fall into such perfect order and arrangement that it becomes impossible for me any longer to desire that anything should be other than it is.  And that, even in the regions where at other times I am most prone to discover error and defect.  You know, for instance, that I am something of an economist?”

“What are you not?” I said.  “If you sin, it is not from lack of light!”