On earth the creative power seems to be, as it were, contending against itself. Good of every kind is in conflict with evil. Slowly and fitfully, with many reverses, good seems to prevail. Humanity as a whole advances, and if we could believe in its collective advance toward an ultimate perfection which all who have contributed to the advance should share, we might have a solution of the great problem. But of this we have no certain assurance. Multitudes come into being who to progress can contribute nothing. There is evil of all kinds that so far as we can see can be followed by no good effect. Plague and famine, with a great part of the common misfortunes of human life, seem merely evil. So, plainly, do the sufferings of animals, sometimes on a terrible scale and apparently quite useless. As long as effort, even painful, is the price of perfection the price must be paid and we acquiesce. But in innumerable cases there appears to be no room for that explanation. The rocks display the fossil remains of whole races of primeval animals produced apparently only to become extinct. Of the earth itself, man's destined habitation, large portions are utterly uninhabitable. The legendary war between the powers of good and evil, God and Satan, Ormuzd and Ahriman, was a fable naturally devised, though the birth of the two powers and the division of existence between them is inconceivable. Can anything like a clear line be drawn between good and evil? Effort and resistance to temptation may seem necessary ingredients in the formation of a virtuous character. So far we may think we have the clue. But what is to be said of the myriads of cases in which virtuous effort seems to be morally impossible; in the case, for instance, of barbarous or corrupt and depraved tribes or nations in which general example is evil? What is to be said of deaths in infancy, when there has been no time for character to be formed? To suppose that the Creator could not have helped it, that this was his only way to the production of virtuous beings, is to deny his omnipotence. A Satan with horns and hoofs, struggling against the power of good, used to be the solution of the problem, but belongs to the simple religion of the past. A plan of which we are ignorant, but of which the end will be good, is apparently our only explanation of the mystery. The earth is beautiful; we have human society with all its interests; we have friendship, love, and marriage; we have art and music. We must trust that the power which will determine the future reveals itself in these. The belief that man has an immortal soul inserted into a mortal body from which, being, as Bishop Butler phrases it, "indiscerptible," it is parted at death, has become untenable. We know that man is one; that all grows and develops together. Imagination cannot picture a disembodied soul. The spiritualist apparitions are always corporeal.