Nature includes, or rather is included by, Christ, the Word of God, by whom it was made.  And the Word was made flesh to teach us that vicarious suffering, which we see to be the law of Nature, is a law of God, a thing not foreign to His own life, and therefore for all alike a condition of perfection, not a reductio ad absurdum of existence.  The reductio ad absurdum is not of Nature, but of selfish individualism, which suffers shipwreck alike in objective and in subjective religion.  It is precisely because the shadow of the Cross lies across the world, that we can watch Nature at work with “admiration, hope, and love,” instead of with horror and disgust.

The religious objection amounts to little more than that Mysticism has not succeeded in solving the problem of evil, which no philosophy has ever attacked with even apparent success.  It is, however, with some reason that this difficulty has been pressed against the mystics; for they are bound by their principles to attempt some solution, and their tendency has been to attenuate the positive character of evil to a somewhat dangerous degree.  But if we sift the charges often brought by religious writers against Mysticism, we shall generally find that there lies at the bottom of their disapproval a residuum of mediaeval dualism, which wishes to see in Christ the conquering invader of a hostile kingdom.  In practice, at any rate, the great mystics have not taken lightly the struggle with the law of sin in our members, or tried to “heal slightly” the wounds of the soul.[391]

It is quite true that the later mystics have been cheerful and optimistic.  But those who have found a kingdom in their own minds, and who have enough strength of character “to live by reason and not by opinion,” as Whichcote says (in a maxim which was anticipated by that arch-enemy of Mysticism—­Epicurus), are likely to be happier than other men.  And, moreover, Wordsworth teaches us that almost, if not quite, every evil may be so transmuted by the “faculty which abides within the soul,” that those “interpositions which would hide and darken” may “become contingencies of pomp, and serve to exalt her native brightness”; even as the moon, “rising behind a thick and lofty grove, turns the dusky veil into a substance glorious as her own.”  So the happy warrior is made “more compassionate” by the scenes of horror which he is compelled to witness.  Whether this healing and purifying effect of sorrow points the way to a solution of the problem of evil or not, it is a high and noble faith, the one and only consolation which we feel not to be a mockery when we are in great trouble.