No one man can be more reasonably credited with having brought about this state of things than Canon Dives of Christ Church. It is not easy, of course, from the Catholic point of view to sympathize with his difficulties or to rest satisfied with his affirmations. But in those days he was a tower of strength to many weak hearts. I remember attending a meeting of the Oxford University Churches Reunion in the J.C.R. at Worcester, to which he read his famous “Explanation of the Existence of Good.” I felt it to be so remarkable a feat that I kept the notes of it, of which I give an abstract. Evil, he said, was an undeniable fact in our experience. The phenomenon of pain, which some short-sighted philosophers had attempted to deny, was sufficiently attested for us by the “fugitive reaction” which it set up in Man and even, apparently, in the lower animals. “If I am kicked on the shin,” he explained with his dry humour, “my instinct is to put my shin elsewhere.” A very little reflection would show us that the parallel phenomenon known as “Moral” evil had an equally real existence. “If I see a man kicking a baby on the shin, my instinct is to remonstrate with him.” He then drew a lurid picture of all the moral evil that went on in the world: even in those days, it was a damning indictment! “Now, gentlemen,” he continued, in that curious little shriek that was so characteristic of his pulpit delivery, “no Evil without Good! Evil cannot exist without implying the existence of its correlative! If you, gentlemen,” (beaming at us through his spectacles) “are to be at liberty to do wrong, you must _ipso facto_ leave me my liberty to do right. You will tell me that, on this showing, Good has only a parasitic, and almost a negative existence. Be it so; it exists. And now, how are we to account for its existence?” He went on to show, in a really eloquent passage, that Evil can only realize itself fully if and in so far as it finds itself in a continual struggle against Good; that Good is, consequently, necessary to the constitution of the world, which demands Evil as a condition of its fulfilment. “Some day, perhaps,” he added, “wiser heads and clearer vision than yours or mine will be able to include Evil and Good under a Higher Synthesis which shall co-ordinate and subsume them both. Meanwhile, we struggle on in the half-light of our uncertainty, only confident that the Power (for so, I think we may call it) which has instilled into our natures such an irresistible craving for what is evil, will somehow, somewhere, bring that evil to fulfilment.” The roof of the J.C.R. echoed again as we testified by our grateful plaudits our gratitude to Canon Dives for his courageous utterance.