practised in the late War and are still being practised in the
distracted country of Russia. Yet we know how revulsion from these
horrors has made many a man who seemed to be sunk in sloth or greed or
carnality into a Bayard or a Galahad. It may well be that this moral
re-birth would never have been effected if the evils which provoked it
had been less monstrous. Here, then, we seem to discern a principle
which _may_ be adequate to explain what all the ills of human life are
'good for'.

I must not deny that all such explanation, in my judgement, involves the
postulate that the ennoblement of character and deepening of insight
brought about by suffering are permanent--in fact, that it requires the
postulates of the existence of God and the reality of everlasting life.
Mr. Russell, I imagine, would regard this as a confession that I am sunk
in what he airily dismisses as 'theological superstitions'. I should
reply that the 'superstition' is on his side; to dismiss God and the
eternal soul, without serious inquiry, as 'superstitions' is just the
most superficial of all the superstitions. It is, of course, incumbent
on anyone who holds the Platonic view to show that its postulates are
not inconsistent with any known truth, and I would add that he ought
also to show that there are at any rate known facts which seem to demand
just this kind of explanation. Both these points, as I hold, can be
established, but I do not in the least wish to suggest that any
philosopher will ever find it an easy task to 'justify the ways of God
to man'. As Timaeus says in Plato, 'to find the father and fashioner of
the Universe is _not_ easy', and I want rather to lay stress on the
magnitude of the task than to extenuate it. But I am concerned to urge
that the doctrine which accounts for what is by what ought to be is the
_only_ philosophical theory on which it ceases to be an unintelligible
mystery that we should have--as I maintain we certainly have--the same