Nor, again, is Mill right in saying that this contradiction is due to ‘slovenliness of thought.’  Theology accepts it with its eyes wide open, making no attempt to explain the inexplicable; and the human will it treats in the same way.  It makes no offer to us to clear up everything, or to enable thought to put a girdle round the universe.  On the contrary, it proclaims with emphasis that its first axioms are unthinkable; and its most renowned philosophic motto is, ’I believe because it is impossible.’

What shall it say, then, when assailed by the rational moralist?  It will not deny its own condition, but it will show its opponent that his is really the same.  It will show him that, let him give his morality what base he will, he cannot conceive of things without the same contradiction in terms.  If good be a thing of any spiritual value—­if it be, in other words, what every moral system supposes it to be—­that good can co-exist with evil is just as unthinkable as that God can.  The value of moral good is supposed to lie in this—­that by it we are put en rapport with something that is better than ourselves—­some ’stream of tendency,’ let us say, ‘that makes for righteousness,’ But if this stream of tendency be not a personal God, what is it?  Is it Nature?  Nature, we have seen already, is open to just the same objections that God is.  It is equally guilty of all the evil that is contained in it.  Is it Truth, then—­pure Truth for its own sake?  Again, we have seen already that as little can it be that.  Is it Human Nature as opposed to Nature?—­Man as distinct from, and holier than, any individual men?  Of all the substitutes for God this at first sight seems the most promising, or, at any rate, the most practical.  But, apart from all the other objections to this, which we have already been considering in such detail, it will very soon be apparent that it involves the very same inconsistency, the same contradiction in terms.  The fact of moral evil still confronts us, and the humanity to which we lift our hearts up is still taxable with that.  But perhaps we separate the good in humanity from the evil, and only worship the former as struggling to get free from the latter.  This, however, will be of little help to us.  If what we call humanity is nothing but the good part of it, we can only vindicate its goodness at the expense of its strength.  Evil is at least an equal match for it, and in most of the battles hitherto it is evil that has been victorious.  But to conceive of good in this way is really to destroy our conception of it.  Goodness is in itself an incomplete notion; it is but one facet of a figure which, approached from other sides, appears to us as eternity, as omnipresence, and, above all, as supreme strength; and to reduce goodness to nothing but the higher part of humanity—­to make it a wavering fitful flame that continually sinks and flickers, that at its best can but blaze for a