But though we cannot understand the origin of evil and why the world is as it is, we can understand something of the processes which are at work for good or ill.  We can in a measure trace whether these processes are making slowly but surely for righteousness, or whether all the sin and the suffering are aimless and purposeless, a voice that cries “believe no more,”

       “An ever breaking shore
    That tumbles in a godless deep.”

Now, I contend that the only ground of despair, the only thing that might-shut us up to pessimism and to “a philosophy only just above suicide mark,” would be not the presence but the absence of these great world evils.  If this world presented a dead-level of comfortable selfishness that on the whole answered fairly well all round, an economy of petty self-interests in stable equilibrium, a world generally wrong, but working out no evil in particular to set it right, a society in which every man was for himself, and not the devil, as at present, but God for us all—­then indeed we might despair.  But who can contemplate humanity as it is, that broken stair of the Divinity, whose top is in the unapproachable light of heaven and whose lowest step rests not on earth but in hell, without feeling that it is destined for an infinite progress, destined for the ascending feet of angels?  Who that gazes on this world, with its infinite depths of pain, its heavy weight of evil, its abysmal falls, its stupendous pressures of wrong and misery, but feels that here, if anywhere, we are in the presence of kinetic energies, of immense moral and spiritual forces, capable of raising the whole of fallen humanity to the heights of the Divine.  For let us remember that in the moral and spiritual world, as well as in the physical, no fall but carries with it the force that can be converted into a rise; no dread resistance of wrong to the right but creates an accumulated force which once let loose can transform an empire; no weight of evil but, in pulling it down, can be made to raise the whole bent of our life.

    “Man partly is, and wholly hopes to be.”

He is “no finite and finished clod.”  Progress, as Browning says, is his distinctive mark, and these deep evils are the gigantic steps by which he rises as he treads them under foot.  Once recognize the fact that he is a fallen being—­and by that I mean no theological dogma, but a truth of life, which, whatever our creed may be, must stare us in the face—­the fact that he is a being knowing good but choosing evil, capable of an ideal but habitually falling below it, no mere automaton, but possessed of a spiritual will and an accusing conscience—­I ask how else can he be educated, in the true sense of the word, and raised from death unto life except by being made to educe his own results and work out his evil premiss to the bitter end, till he is forced to go back upon himself, and recognize the right principle which he has violated?  The very law of his being, of every being who is being raised from death unto life, is, that he can only know life through death, only grasp good by grappling with evil, only gain knowledge by knowing ignorance; his highest must be sown in weakness before it can be raised in power, must be sown in dishonor before it can be raised in glory.