anarchist should be burned.  She could do nothing else, and society supported her—­still supports her; yet the Church, who was wiser than the State, had always seen that Saint Augustine dealt with only half the question.  She knew that evil might be an excess of good as well as absence of it; that good leads to evil, evil to good; and that, as Pascal says, “three degrees of polar elevation upset all jurisprudence; a meridian decides truth; fundamental laws change; rights have epochs.  Pleasing Justice! bounded by a river or a mountain! truths on this side the Pyrenees! errors beyond!” Thomas conceded that God Himself, with the best intentions, might be the source of evil, and pleaded only that his action might in the end work benefits.  He could offer no proof of it, but he could assume as probable a plan of good which became the more perfect for the very reason that it allowed great liberty in detail.

One hardly feels Saint Thomas here in all his force.  He offers suggestion rather than proof;—­apology—­the weaker because of obvious effort to apologize—­rather than defence, for Infinite Goodness, Justice, and Power; scoffers might add that he invented a new proof ab defectu, or argument for proving the perfection of a machine by the number of its imperfections; but at all events, society has never done better by way of proving its right to enforce morals or unity of opinion.  Unless it asserts law, it can only assert force.  Rigid theology went much further.  In God’s providence, man was as nothing.  With a proper sense of duty, every solar system should be content to suffer, if thereby the efficiency of the Milky Way were improved.  Such theology shocked Saint Thomas, who never wholly abandoned man in order to exalt God.  He persistently brought God and man together, and if he erred, the Church rightly pardons him because he erred on the human side.  Whenever the path lay through the valley of despair he called God to his aid, as though he felt the moral obligation of the Creator to help His creation.

At best the vision of God, sitting forever at His work-table, willing the existence of mankind exactly as it is, while conscious that, among these myriad arbitrary creations of His will, hardly one in a million could escape temporary misery or eternal damnation, was not the best possible background for a Church, as the Virgin and the Saviour frankly admitted by taking the foreground; but the Church was not responsible for it.  Mankind could not admit an anarchical—­a dual or a multiple—­universe.  The world was there, staring them in the face, with all its chaotic conditions, and society insisted on its unity in self-defence.  Society still insists on treating it as unity, though no longer affecting logic.  Society insists on its free will, although free will has never been explained to the satisfaction of any but those who much wish to be satisfied, and although the words in any common sense implied not unity but duality in creation.  The Church had nothing to do with inventing this riddle—­the oldest that fretted mankind.