The attempts of theologians to reconcile the existence of evil with the goodness of an almighty Creator, by relegating the adjustment to a future life, only make the fact of this fundamental polarity more apparent, for their conceptions of a heaven and a hell obviously do not reconcile, but only intensify, the opposite polarities. The good are better, the bad worse, the happy happier, and the wretched more miserable, in all these attempts to define the undefinable and to reconcile divine justice with divine mercy. All that remains really clear to each individual is that by his efforts in this life he can do something to keep the balance of polarities somewhat more on the side of good, both in his own individual existence, and in that of the aggregate of units, of which he is one, which is called society or humanity. The great advantage of this form of religious hypothesis, which for want of a better name I call Zoroastrianism, is that, in the first place, it gets rid of the antagonism between religion and science, for there is no possible discovery of science which is irreconcilable with the fact that there is a necessary and inevitable polarity of good and evil, and in the background a great unknown, which may be regarded with those feelings and aspirations which are inseparable from human nature. And secondly, there is the still greater advantage that we can devote ourselves with a whole heart and sincere mind to the worship of the good principle, without paltering with our moral nature by professing to love and adore a Being who is the author of all the evil and misery in the world as well as of the good. If it were really true that there were such a Being as theologians describe, who created the immense majority of the human race vessels of wrath doomed to eternal punishment, either from pure caprice or to avenge the slight offered to Him by the disobedience of a remote ancestor, what would be the attitude of every healthy human soul towards such a Being? Rather that of Prometheus or Satan, than of Gabriel or Michael; of heroic defiance than of abject submission. We may gloss this over in words, but the fact remains, and it is difficult to overestimate the amount of evil which has resulted in the world from this confusion of moral sentiments which has made good men do devil’s work in the belief that it had divine sanction.