It is the purpose, the meaning and thought of God, that is immanent not God Himself.  He is not limited to the world that He has made; He is beyond it, the source and ground of it all, but not it.  Just as you may say that in Shakespeare’s work his thoughts and feelings are immanent; you find them there in the book, but you don’t find Shakespeare, the living, thinking, acting man, in the book.  You have to infer the kind of being that he was from what he wrote; he himself is not there; his thoughts are there.

He pronounces “the most real of all problems,” the problem of evil, to be soluble. Why is there no problem of good? Note well, that “the problem of evil is always a problem in terms of purpose.”  How evil came does not matter:  the question is, Why is it here?  What is it doing?  “While we are sitting at our ease it generally seems to us that the world would be very much better if all evil were abolished. . . .  But would it?”

     Surely we know that one of the best of the good things in life is
     victory, and particularly moral victory.  But to demand victory
     without an antagonist is to demand something with no meaning.

If you take all the evil out of the world you will remove the possibility of the best thing in life.  That does not mean that evil is good.  What one means by calling a thing good is that the spirit rests permanently content with it for its own sake.  Evil is precisely that with which no spirit can rest content; and yet it is the condition, not the accidental but the essential condition, of what is in and for itself the best thing in life, namely moral victory.

His definition of Sin helps us to understand his politics: 

     Sin is the self-assertion either of a part of a man’s nature
     against the whole, or of a single member of the human family
     against the welfare of that family and the will of its Father.

But if it is self-will, he asks, how is it to be overcome?

Not by any kind of force; for force cannot bend the will.  Not by any kind of external transaction; that may remit the penalty, but will not of itself change the will.  It must be by the revelation of a love so intense that no heart which beats can remain indifferent to it.

All this seems to me admirably said.  It does at least show that there are clear, logical, and practical reasons for the religious hypothesis.  The mind of man, seeking to penetrate the physical mysteries of the universe, encounters Mind.  Mind meets Mind.  Reason recognises, if it does not always salute, Reason.  And in this rational and evolving universe the will of man has a struggle with itself, a struggle on which man clearly sees the fortunes of his progress, both intellectual and spiritual, depend.  Will recognises Will.  And surveying the history of his race he comes to a standstill of love and admiration before only one life—­