It is only when we look behind the phenomena of the universe at this Great First Cause, that I see anything to object to in the definition of Dr. Temple, and of Christian philosophers generally. They assume it to be a personal Deity, who is to a great extent known or knowable, and therefore must have attributes conformable to human perceptions which are the basis of all human knowledge. In other words, however much we may purify and enlarge these attributes, He must be essentially an anthropomorphic God or magnified man. To this theory there seems to me to be this fatal objection, that it gives no account of the origin of evil, or rather that it makes the Divine Creator directly responsible for it. The existence of evil in the world is as palpable a fact as the existence of good. There are many things which to our human perceptions appear to be base, cruel, foul, and ugly, just as clearly as other things appear to be noble, merciful, pure, and beautiful. Whence come they? If the existence of good proves a good Creator, how can we escape the inference that the existence of evil proves an evil one? This is never so forcibly impressed on me as when I read the arguments of those who insist most strongly on the conception of a one, anthropomorphic God. When Carlyle says, ‘All that is good, generous, wise, right—whatever I deliberately and for ever love in others and myself—who or what could by any possibility have given it to me but One who first had it to give? This is not logic, but axiom.’ I cannot but picture to myself the sledgehammer force with which, if he had approached the question without prepossessions, he would have come down on the cant, the insincerity, the treason to the eternal veracities, which refused to look facts in the face, and apply the same reasoning to the evil. Or if Arnold defines the Deity as the ‘Something not ourselves which makes for righteousness,’ how of the Something not ourselves which makes for unrighteousness? The only escape I can find from this dilemma is to accept existing facts and not evade them. It is a fact that polarity is the law of existence. Why we know not, any more than we know the real essence and origin of the atoms and energies which are our other ultimate facts. But we accept atoms and energies, and accept the law of gravity and other laws; why not accept also the law of polarity, and admit that it is part of the ‘original impress’: one of the fundamental conditions under which the evolution of Creation from its ultimate elements is necessitated to proceed. This the human mind can understand; beyond it is the great unknown or unknowable, in presence of which we can only feel emotions of reverence and of awe, and ‘faintly trust the larger hope’ that duality may somehow ultimately be merged in unity, evil in good, and ‘every winter turn to spring.’