But though the will to believe that the cosmos is untrustworthy cannot in practice be carried out in all its logical (or illogical) conclusions, it can be and is acted on intermittently, and such action is regress. So far as it is carried out, it is the negation of progress; if it could be carried out completely and by all men, there would be an end of progress; science, morality, and religion would be extinguished; evil would triumph over good. The history of evolution shows that, as a matter of fact, such unfaith in the reality of our ideals has been only intermittent; for the course of evolution has been, on the whole, progress. Individual experience shows that there comes a point, soon or late, at which the will, acting freely, refuses to go further with its rejection of morality: there are some things which even a bad man will not do--however oddly they may seem chosen. In theory, in philosophy, there is a point at which the will refuses to go further with its rejection of the common reason, in which all men share: there are some things which even the sceptic refuses to disbelieve, _e.g._ those which are necessary to his conviction that nothing can be believed. These considerations may serve to confirm us in the belief that progress has been the law of evolution in the past and will increasingly be in the future. They should so confirm us, for they do but carry out, as far as history, individual experience, and imagination can take us, our fundamental faith in the reality of those ideals that are revealed in consciousness to all of us. Belief in the possibility of progress at all carries with it, as its logical postulate, faith in the wisdom and goodness of God. But if wisdom and goodness are the source of all reality, and if the final purpose of evolution is the realisation of the ideal--viz. love of truth, of our fellow-beings, and of God--what are we to say of evil? Is it not real? It is real, in the same sense that our pleasures and pains are real, but not in the same sense that the ideal is real. The real things which our sense-experience reveals to us are real in the sense that they are permanent, independent of us, and self-identical. The same characteristics attach to the realities revealed to us in our moral and spiritual experience. The laws of morality and the goodness of God do not come and go with our fleeting recognitions of them; they are permanent, independent of us, and are ever the same: God's goodness faileth never. The uniformity of Nature is but one expression of the uniformity of the Divine love for man: it is that which makes it possible for man to know the truth and survive in the struggle for existence. But evil is not independent of us men: it exists only so far as we will it to exist. It is not permanent: it comes and goes with our passing acts of will. It is not self-identical, but tends to self-destruction. It is the will to believe nothing, and