of sinners and unbelievers are tortured for ever after death, and trust
the whole scheme of things to the love and justice of God.

The grave difficulty of this enlightened theology, indeed of all
theology, is the immense amount of pain and evil in the universe, and
this mighty war we are considering puts it in a very acute form. It is
amusing to look back on some of the lines of apologetics in recent
years. There was a school of people, following some "profound" religious
thinker, who held that evil was "only relative." They made the wonderful
discovery that everything real is good, in the metaphysical sense, and
evil is unreal. Evil, they said, is merely the negation, the
falling-short, of good; and you do not ask for the creator or cause of a
negative thing. More recently a school endeavoured to come to their
assistance with the discovery that pain does not really exist at all.
One did not need to know philosophy or science in order to realise that
a sensation of pain is just as positive and real a thing as a sensation
of pleasure; or that, although death is _only_ the negation of life, one
is really entitled to ask why one's dear child is thus "negated" at the
age of six or twelve. Then there came this new school with its discovery
that pain does not exist. Death, of course, is an entry into a more
glorious life beyond; pain is an illusion to be banished by resolute
thought. These childish symposia were interrupted every few years by
some disastrous earthquake, the sinking of a great liner, an epidemic of
disease, a famine, and so on; but the pious philosophers bravely
struggled on. One may trust that the war has reduced them to silence,
and that we need not linger over them.

Then there was the school which sought desperately to find good in evil.
A man or woman is stricken with disease. Very often it brings with it a
softening, an improvement, of character; either in the patient or in the