3. Goodness is not remoteness from badness. In one sense, goodness is based upon badness; that is, good action is always based upon action good once, but bad if persisted in under changing circumstances. The moral struggle thus presents itself as the conflict between this "bad" and the good which would duly meet the existing situation. This good, of course, does not involve the annihilation of the previously attained good--the present bad--but its subordination; its use in the new function. This is the explanation of the apparently paradoxical statement that badness is the material of good action--a statement literally correct when badness is understood as it is here. Evil is simply that which goodness has to _overcome_--has to make an element of itself. Badness, as just spoken of, is only potential--the end is bad as contrasted with the better. Badness may also, of course, be actual; the bad end may be chosen, and adopted into character. Even in this sense, goodness is not the absence of evil, or entire freedom from it. Badness even on this basis is the material of goodness; it is to be put under foot and made an element in good action. But how can actual evil be made a factor of right conduct? In this way; the good man learns from his own bad acts; he does not continue to repeat such acts, nor does he, while recognizing their badness, simply endeavor to do right without regard to the previous bad conduct. Perceiving the effect of his own wrong acts, the change produced in his own capacities, and his altered relations to other people, he acts so as to meet the situation which his own bad act has helped to create. Conduct is then right, although made what it is, to some degree, by previous wrong conduct. In this connection, the introduction of Christianity made one of its largest ethical contributions. It showed how it was possible for a man to put his badness behind him and even make it an element in goodness. Teaching that the world of social relations was itself an ethical reality and a good (a redeemed world), it taught that the individual, by identifying himself with the spirit of this ethical world, might be freed from slavery to his past evil; that by recognizing and taking for his own the evil in the world, instead of engaging in an isolated struggle to become good by himself, he might make the evil a factor in his own right action. Moreover, by placing morality in activity and not in some thing, or in conformity to an external law, Christianity changed the nature of the struggle. While the old struggle had been an effort to get away from evil to a good beyond, Christianity made the struggle itself a good. It, then, was no longer the effort to escape to some fixed, unchanging state; the constant onward movement was itself the goal. Virtue, as Hegel says, is the battle, the struggle, carried to its full.