Death, of course, is not an evil when it comes in the regular course of nature; it is an evil when it comes prematurely. The various social evils tend to correct themselves. Moral evils--lying, cheating, selfishness, uncharitableness--also tend to correct themselves. Righteousness exalteth a nation because righteousness has great survival value. The unrighteousness of Germany caused her final downfall. In an earlier age, when ethical standards were lower, she might have succeeded in dominating Europe. Our susceptibility to pain is not an evil inasmuch as it safeguards us against a thousand dangers. What I would say in a score of ways is that there is no evil in the human world not of our own making. Plagues and famines are always the result of human folly or short-sightedness. Filth breeds disease. Typhoid fever is a filth disease and is preventable. There is no god to blame for our distempers. Nature’s hands are clean. The wind is never tempered to the shorn lamb, in spite of the proverb, but the shorn lamb has not been fleeced by Nature. A heavy snowfall is an evil in towns and cities, but a good thing for the country. It enables the meadow mice to girdle the apple-trees, but it is a coverlid that greatly profits the meadows themselves. It is therefore good to both mice and meadows. Our greatest philosopher, William James, had a wide grasp of fundamental questions, but it seems to me that he did not fully grasp the problem of evil; he saw the universe as a dual universe, two principles, good and evil, struggling with each other. He seemed to look upon good and evil as positive entities in themselves, whereas naturalism sees in them only names which we give to our experiences with objects and conditions in this world. What favors us, as I have so often said, we call good, and what antagonizes we call evil; but absolute good and absolute evil do not exist, any more than do absolute up and down; or absolute near and far. The absolute admits of no degrees, but there are all degrees of good and bad. Some hostile germs are worse than others, and some friendly germs are better than others. Again I say, we live in a world of relativity. Naturalism does not see two immeasurable realities, God and Nature, it sees only one, that all is Nature or all is God, just as you prefer. James was fond of quoting Walt Whitman, but he does not see, as Whitman did, that there is no evil, or, if there is, that it is just as necessary as the so-called good. From James’s point of view Nature is a harlot to whom we owe no allegiance, and another world is demanded to correct and compensate the failures and disappointments of this.