Among practical consequences note the difference between the theistic attitude in fatal sickness and the spiritual attitude.[42] The theist presupposes that there is a God to whose will he must patiently submit. But theism is a principle of explanation, the God-idea being employed to account for the finite order. God is thus made responsible for the suffering of the sick as well as for all other evils in the world. Hence the very idea which is presupposed in order to produce patience raises up doubts and perplexities, which imperil patience. If God made the world why does he permit pain and evil? The spiritual attitude, on the contrary, ethically interpreted, does not presuppose the idea of a divine order as a dogma, but offers it as the product of the experience of suffering itself. The conviction that there is in man an essential spiritual self, a holy thing, and a spiritual universe, a holy community, are not gifts to which we fall heir at birth, or by some sort of revelation borrow from the experience of ancient teachers; they are a supreme good to be arduously worked out by ourselves. And the interpretation given to the facts of suffering and frustration is that they can be used as the means of bringing to birth in us that supreme conviction. In general it may be said that the purpose of existence, both of the individual and of the race, is so to work in the finite world as to become possessed with ever greater distinctness of the conviction of the reality of the wholly real world, the infinite supersensible universe. The attitude of the Christian is other-worldly. He shuns intimacy with the finite world and turns his face toward his “true home.” The attitude herein described is that of hearty attack upon the business of life, and close embrace of all the partial reality which finite experience contains, with a view of thus acquiring in some measure an appreciation of the utter reality of which these partial realities are hints and glimmerings. NOTE IV