How has the problem of evil tried men’s souls! How have their gods failed to live up to the character they have given them! How have they confused our moral standards! The trouble lies in a misconception of the nature of evil, and in a false idea of the universe itself. There is no problem of evil until we have made or imagined an unnatural and impossible world. When we have enthroned in the universe a powerful man-made God who is the embodiment of all we call good and the contemner of all we call evil, then we have our insoluble problem. To help ourselves out we invent another being who is the embodiment of all we call evil and enthrone him in regions below. Upon him we saddle the evil, and thus we try to run the universe with these two antagonistic principles yoked together, and no end of confusion in our religious ideas results. The moment we postulate an all-loving, all-merciful, all-wise, and just being to rule the affairs of this world, and place him in such intimate relations with it that not a sparrow falls to the ground without his will and cognizance, then, indeed, are we in troubled waters and have lost our reckoning. We cannot excuse such being on the ground that his ways are inscrutable and past finding out. A creator who sends into the world the malformed, the half-witted, the bestial, the naturally depraved, and then holds them to high ethical standards, is condemned by the ideals which he has implanted within us. Now the naturalist has no such trouble. He sees that good and evil are only relative terms; that they both grow on the same tree; that we should not know good were there no evil; that there would be no development were there not what we call evil. Pain and suffering are inseparable from the human lot. They are a part of the price we pay for our place in the world. All struggle we look upon as evil. Disease, failure, death are looked upon as evil, but they are conditions of our lives. Through sickness we learn the laws of health. The lower animals have no such troubles--no sickness, intemperance, or war or avarice. They know without reason how to live, but man has reason, and the joy of its exercise and the peril of its failure. Are we not all willing to pay the price?--to take it on these terms rather than to change places with the brutes?