The only alternative I see is to conceive of God in terms of universal Nature--a nature God in whom we really live and move and have our being, with whom our relation is as intimate and constant as that of the babe in its mother’s womb, or the apple upon the bough. This is the God that science and reason reveal to us--the God we touch with our hands, see with our eyes, hear with our ears, and from whom there is no escape--a God whom we serve and please by works and not by words, whose worship is deeds, and whose justification is in adjusting ourselves to his laws and availing ourselves of his bounty, a God who is indeed from everlasting to everlasting. Of course in the light of the old theology this is no God at all. It was to emancipate us from the rule of this God that the old conceptions of a being above and far removed from Nature were formulated. Nature is carnal and unholy. Our theory compels us to say to matter and the laws of matter, “Get thee behind me, Satan.” We struggle and suffer in this debasing world for a season, and then escape from it to a higher and better one. In all the dark, prescientific ages during our own era--dark in regard to man’s real relation to the universe in which he finds himself, but often luminous with flashes of insight into the nature of man himself--these conceptions ruled man’s religious aspirations. In our own times they still largely rule in various modified forms. The old theological dogmas are more or less discredited, but a religion founded upon science makes little headway with the average man. We are shaping our practical lives--our business, our social, our economical relations, more and more according to scientific deductions. We seek more and more a scientific or naturalistic basis for our rules of conduct, for our altruism, for our charitable organizations, for our whole ethical system. Any principle that squares with natural law is indeed founded upon a rock. The stars in their courses fight for the cause that is founded upon natural right, which in human relations does not mean the right of the strong to trample upon the weak, but the right of all to their full measure of free development. Right and wrong are, of course, finite terms, and apply only in the human sphere. Universal Nature, as it appears among non-living bodies and forces, knows neither right nor wrong; it knows only might. As it appears among the orders below man, it knows neither right nor wrong. Physics and chemistry have no consciousness; neither have beasts or bacteria; but man has, and this fact will in time determine the whole course of human history. Naturalism makes for righteousness, or right-mindedness, as surely as it makes for health and longevity. XII THE PROBLEM OF EVIL I