natural agents. . . . All which people are accustomed to deprecate as 'disorder' and its consequences, is precisely a counterpart of Nature's ways. Anarchy and the Reign of Terror are overmatched in injustice, ruin, and death, by a hurricane and a pestilence."28

The main thesis of the Essay on Nature is that it is "irrational and immoral" to "make the spontaneous course of things the model" of man's voluntary actions.29 The incidental conclusion of the essay is the position which has been stated by way of anticipation, namely, that it is absurd and irrational to hold that God is perfectly good and also allpowerful. "The only admissible moral theory of Creation," says Mill, "is that the Principle of Good cannot at once and altogether subdue the powers of evil, either physical or moral. .. Those who have been strengthened in goodness by relying on the sympathizing power of a powerful and good Governor of the world, have, I am satisfied, never really believed that Governor to be, in the strict sense of the term, omnipotent. They have always saved his goodness at the expense of his power."30 Recurring to the same thought in the essay on the Utility of Religion, Mill contends that "one only form of belief in the supernatural-one only theory respecting the origin and government of the universe-stands wholly clear both of intellectual contradiction and of moral obliquity. It is that which, resigning irrevocably the idea of an omnipotent creator, regards Nature and Life not as the expression throughout of the moral character and purpose of the Deity, but as the product of a struggle between contriving goodness and an intractable material, as was believed by Plato, or a principle of evil, as was the doctrine of the Manichæans."31

"That

Mill shows that all the attempts that are made to escape this conclusion are futile, and tacitly presuppose it. much applauded class of authors, the writers on natural the

28 Three Essays on Religion, pp. 28 ff.

29 Ibid., p. 64.

30 Ibid., pp. 39 f.

31 Ibid., p. 116.

ology,. have exhausted the resources of sophistry to make it appear that all the suffering in the world exists to prevent greater that misery exists, for fear lest there should be misery: a thesis which, if ever so well maintained, could only avail to explain and justify the works of limited beings, compelled to labor under conditions independent of their own will; but can have no application to a Creator assumed to be omnipotent, who, if he bends to a supposed necessity, himself makes the necessity which he bends to. If the maker of the world can all that he will, he wills misery, and there is no escape from the conclusion."

If we nevertheless attempt to escape by saying that "the goodness of God does not consist in willing the happiness of his creatures, but their virtue," Mill replies that "if the Creator of mankind willed that they should all be virtuous, his designs are as completely baffled as if he had willed that they should all be happy."32

"But, it is said, all these things are for wise and good ends." It may be said that "we do not know what wise reasons the Omniscient may have had for leaving undone. things which he had the power to do. It is not perceived that this plea itself implies a limit to Omnipotence. When a thing is obviously good and obviously in accordance with what all the evidences of creation imply to have been the Creator's design, and we say we do not know what good reason he may have had for not doing it, we mean that we do not know to what other, still better object—to what object still more completely in the line of his purposes, he may have seen fit to postpone it. But the necessity of postponing one thing to another belongs only to limited power. Omnipotence could have made the objects compatible. Omnipotence does not need to weigh one consideration against another. . . . No one purpose imposes necessary limitations on another in the case of a Being not restricted by conditions of possibility."33

32 Ibid., p. 37.

33 Ibid., pp. 179 f.

Therefore "the notion of a providential government by an omnipotent Being for the good of his creatures must be entirely dismissed."34 If we believe that God is all-powerful and that Nature is his handiwork, our "worship must either be greatly overclouded by doubt, and occasionally quite darkened by it, or the moral sentiments must sink to the low level of the ordinances of Nature: the worshipper must learn to think blind partiality, atrocious cruelty, and reckless injustice, not blemishes in an object of worship, since all these abound to excess in the commonest phenomena of Nature. . . . . . He who comes out with least moral damage from this embarrassment, is probably the one who . . . confesses to himself that the purposes of Providence are mysterious, that its ways are not our ways, that its justice and goodness are not the justice and goodness which we can conceive and which it befits us to prac tise. When, however, this is the feeling of the believer, the worship of the Deity ceases to be the adoration of abstract moral perfection. It becomes the bowing down to a gigantic image of something not fit for us to imitate. It is the worship of power only."35

The very argument which has been chiefly relied upon to prove the existence of God, namely, the argument from design, far from establishing his omnipotence, is easily shown to be incompatible with it. "It is not too much to say that every indication of Design in the Kosmos is so much evidence against the Omnipotence of the Designer. For what is meant by Design? Contrivance: the adaptation of means to an end. But the necessity of contrivance-the need of employing means -is a consequence of the limitation of power. . . . Wisdom and contrivance are shown in overcoming difficulties, and there is no room for them in a Being for whom no difficulties exist. The evidences, therefore, of Natural Theology distinctly imply that the author of the Kosmos worked under limitations; that he was obliged to adapt himself to conditions independent 34 Ibid.,

p. 243.

35 Ibid., pp. 112 f.

of his will, and to attain his ends by such arrangements as those conditions admitted of."36

A creed like this makes human life significant. "A virtuous human being assumes in this theory the exalted character of a fellow-laborer with the Highest, a fellow-combatant in the great strife; contributing his little, which by the aggregation of many like himself becomes much, towards that progressive ascendancy, and ultimately complete triumph of good over evil, which history points to, and which this doctrine teaches us to regard as planned by the Being to whom we owe all the benevolent contrivance we behold in Nature."37

Mill's position is enthusiastically endorsed by William James in his volume on A Pluralistic Universe. "When John Mill said that the notion of God's omnipotence must be given up if God is to be kept as a religious object, he was surely accurately right; yet so prevalent is the lazy monism that idly haunts the region of God's name, that so simple and truthful a saying was generally treated as a paradox. God, it was said, could not be finite. I believe that the only God worthy of the name must be finite."38 With all its ambiguities and inconsistencies, the common conception of God is at bottom that of a finite Being. The God of David or of Isaiah, the Heavenly Father of the New Testament, is not the Absolute. "That God," says James, "is an essentially finite being in the cosmos, not with the cosmos in him." "The God of our popular Christianity is but one member of a pluralistic system. He and we stand outside of each other, just as the devil, the saints, and the angels stand outside of both of us."39

Mill's polemic is directed against the doctrine of omnipotence as held by traditional orthodoxy; that of James is directed against the conception of the Absolute, which has been supposed by its adherents to solve difficulties such as those 36 Ibid., pp. 176 ff.

37 Ibid., p. 117.

38 James, A Pluralistic Universe, p. 124.

39 Ibid., pp. 110 f.; see also The Will to Believe, pp. 116 and 134 f.

raised by Mill.40 "The absolute," insists James, "taken seriously, and not as a mere name for our right occasionally to drop the strenuous mood and take a moral holiday, introduces all those tremendous irrationalities into the universe which a frankly pluralistic theism escapes, but which have been flung as a reproach at every form of monistic theism or pantheism. It introduces a speculative 'problem of evil' namely, and leaves us wondering why the perfection of the absolute should require just such hideous forms of life as darken the day for our human imaginations. If they were forced upon it by something alien, and to 'overcome' them the absolute had still to keep hold of them, we could understand its feeling of triumph, though we, so far as we were ourselves among the elements overcome, could acquiesce but sullenly in the resultant situation, and would never just have chosen it as the most rational one conceivable. But the absolute is represented as a being without environment, upon which nothing alien can be forced. . . . Its perfection is represented as the source of things, and yet the first effect of that perfection is the tremendous imperfection of all finite experience."41

To this the partisan of the Absolute will, of course, object that the imperfection of the finite is a logically indispensable condition of the perfection of the Infinite. And not only the monistic idealist, but the defender of traditional theology may take this position. Thus St. Augustine long ago taught that evil does not disturb the order and beauty of the universe; for "as a painting with dark colors rightly distributed is beautiful, so also is the sum of things beautiful for him who has power to view them all at one glance, notwithstanding the presence of sin, although, when considered separately, their beauty is marred by the deformity of sin. God would not have created those angels and men of whom he knew beforehand that they would be wicked, if he had not also known how they 40 Religious Aspect of Philosophy, p. 453; Sources of Religious Insight, pp. 240 ff.

41 A Pluralistic Universe, p. 117.