higher self; or his origin with his nature. It is as repugnant to us as it
was to him to imagine that our moral ideas are to be attributed only to
cerebral forces. The value of a human soul, like the value of a man's life
to himself, is inestimable, and cannot be reckoned in earthly or material
things. The human being alone has the consciousness of truth and justice
and love, which is the consciousness of God. And the soul becoming more
conscious of these, becomes more conscious of her own immortality.

10. The last ground of our belief in immortality, and the strongest, is
the perfection of the divine nature. The mere fact of the existence of God
does not tend to show the continued existence of man. An evil God or an
indifferent God might have had the power, but not the will, to preserve us.
He might have regarded us as fitted to minister to his service by a
succession of existences,--like the animals, without attributing to each
soul an incomparable value. But if he is perfect, he must will that all
rational beings should partake of that perfection which he himself is. In
the words of the Timaeus, he is good, and therefore he desires that all
other things should be as like himself as possible. And the manner in
which he accomplishes this is by permitting evil, or rather degrees of
good, which are otherwise called evil. For all progress is good relatively
to the past, and yet may be comparatively evil when regarded in the light
of the future. Good and evil are relative terms, and degrees of evil are
merely the negative aspect of degrees of good. Of the absolute goodness of
any finite nature we can form no conception; we are all of us in process of
transition from one degree of good or evil to another. The difficulties
which are urged about the origin or existence of evil are mere dialectical
puzzles, standing in the same relation to Christian philosophy as the
puzzles of the Cynics and Megarians to the philosophy of Plato. They arise
out of the tendency of the human mind to regard good and evil both as
relative and absolute; just as the riddles about motion are to be explained