The fact is, that directly we make mention of the “aeons”—­the world’s age histories—­we are met with that Protean problem that always seems to lurk at the bottom of every religious question:  Why was evil permitted?  Mr. J.S.  Mill, many readers will recollect, concluded that if there was a God, that God was not perfectly good, or else was not omnipotent.  Now of course our limited faculties do not enable us to apprehend a really absolute and unlimited omnipotence.  We can only conceive of God as limited by the terms of His own Nature and Being.  We say it is “impossible for God to lie,” or for the Almighty to do wrong in any shape; in other words, we are, in this as in other matters where the finite and the Infinite are brought into contact, led up to two necessary conclusions which cannot be reconciled.  We can reason out logically and to a full conclusion, that given a God, that God must be perfect, unlimited and unconditioned.  We can also reason out, provided we take purely human and finite premises, another line of thought which forbids us to suppose that a Perfect God would have allowed evil, suffering, or pain; and this leads us exactly or nearly to Mr. Mill’s conclusion.

Whenever we are thus brought up to a dead-lock, as it were, there is the need of faith, which is the faculty whereby the finite is linked on to the Infinite.  For this faith has two great features:  one is represented by the capacity for assimilating fact which is spiritual or transcendental, and therefore not within the reach of finite intellect; the other is represented by the capacity for reliance on, and trust in, the God whose infinite perfections we cannot as finite creatures grasp or follow.

In the difficult scheme of the world’s governance, in the storms, earthquakes, pestilences, sufferings of all kinds—­signs of failure, sickness, and decay, and death, signs of the victory of evil and the failure of good—­we can only believe in God, and that all will issue in righteous ends.  And our belief proceeds, as just stated, on two lines:  one being our spiritual capacity for knowing that GOD IS, and that we, His creatures, are the objects of His love; the other being the fact that we only see a very little end of the thread, or perhaps only a little of one thread out of a vast mass of complicated threads, in the great web of design and governance, and that therefore there is wide ground for confidence that the end will be success.  We rely confidently on God.  If it is asked, Why is it a part of faith to have a childlike confidence in an unseen God?—­we reply, that the main origin of such confidence is to be found in the wonderful condescension of God exhibited in the Incarnation, the Cross, and the Resurrection.