“Well,” he continued, “there is, I suppose, no department of affairs which one is more inclined to criticise than this.  And yet the more one investigates the more one discovers, even here, the harmony and necessity that pervade the whole universe.  The ebb and flow of business from this trade or country to that, the rise and fall of wages, or of the rate of interest, the pouring of capital into or out of one industry or another, the varying relations of imports to exports, the periods of depression and recovery, and in close connection with all this the ever-changing conditions of the lives of countless workmen throughout the world, their well-being or ill-being, it may be their very life and death, together with the whole fate of future generations in health, capacity, opportunity, and the like,—­all this complexus of things, so chaotic and unintelligible at the first view, so full, as we say, of iniquity, injustice, and the like, falls, as we penetrate further, into one vast and harmonious system, so inspiring to the imagination, so inevitable to the understanding, that our objections and cavillings, ethical, aesthetic, or what you will, simply vanish away at the clearer vision, or, if they persist, persist as mere irrelevant illusions; while we abandon ourselves to the contemplation of the whole, as of some world-symphony, whose dissonances, no less than its concords, are taken up and resolved in the irresistible march and progress, the ocean-flooding of the Whole.  You will think,” he continued, “that I am absurdly rhapsodical over what, after all, is matter prosaic enough; but what I wanted to suggest was that it is Reality so conceived that appeals to me at once as Truth and as Good.  This partial vision of mine in the economic sphere is a kind of type of the way in which I conceive the Absolute.  I conceive Him to be a Being necessary and therefore perfect; a Being in face of whom our own incoherent and tentative criticisms, our complaints that this or that should, if only it could, be otherwise, our regrets, desires, aspirations, and the like, shew but as so many testimonies to our own essential imperfection, weaknesses to be surmounted, rather than signs of worth to stamp us, as we vainly boast, the elect of creation.”

He finished; and I half expected that Leslie would intervene, since I saw, as I thought, many weak points in the position.  But he kept silence, impressed, perhaps, by that idea of the Perfect and Eternal which has a natural home in the minds of the generous and the young.  So I began myself rather tentatively: 

“I think,” I said, “I understand the position you wish to indicate; and so stated, in general terms, no doubt it is attractive.  It is when we endeavour to work it out in detail that the difficulties appear.  The position, as I understand it, is, that, from the point of view of the Absolute, what we call Evil and what we call Good simply have no existence.  Good and Evil, in our sense, are mere appearances; and Good, in the absolute sense, is identical with the Absolute or with God?”