All this is reasonable, when you are talking about finite creatures; but try to think for one moment of an archangel, a pure and clear-eyed intelligence, deliberately choosing to rebel against Omnipotence! He must have known it would be utterly, absolutely, forever hopeless! Intelligent creatures do not rebel under conditions like that, particularly when you combine with the absolute hopelessness of the case the fact that he knew he was choosing misery, suffering, forever. As I said, the whole conception of the origin of evil that implies the rebellion of a spiritual being who knew what he was doing is inexpressibly absurd, so absurd that we may dismiss it as impossible. If there were any such rebellion, if you waive the absurdity for the moment and consider the possibility, God would be responsible; for he made him. The whole theory is not only absurd: it is unjust in its implications towards both God and man. And then, and perhaps we need not say any more about it, we know that it is not true. It did not even originate in the Bible, it did not even originate among the Jews: it is nothing in the world but a pagan myth imported into Jewish tradition just a few hundred years before the birth of Jesus. It is of no more authority in rational human thought than the story of Jason or Hercules, not one particle. Let us now turn, then, to what we know, from the history of man and the scientific study of the universe, to be something approaching the reality of things. People have always been talking about the origin of evil. It is not the origin of evil that we have to face or deal with or explain at all. Let me ask you to consider for a moment the condition of the world when man first appeared on this planet. Here among the lower animals were what? All the vices and all the crimes that we can conceive of, only they were not vices nor crimes at all. There were all the external actions and all the internal feelings and passions; but they were not vices, and they were not crimes. Why? Because there was no moral sense which recognized anything better, no moral standard in the light of which they might be judged. Here, for example, in this lower world, were all hatreds, jealousies, envies, cruelties, thefts, greeds, murders, every kind of action that we speak of as evil in man. And yet I said there was no evil there, no moral evil there, because there was no consciousness, no recognition, of the distinction between the lower and the higher. This was a part of the natural and intended order of the development of life, not an accident, not an invasion from the outside, not a thwarting of the will of God, not an interference with his purpose, all of this a part of the working out of his purpose.