I have resolved, therefore, to deal with these matters once for all, in as familiar a way as I can. I cannot, of course, give my readers solutions of these questions; I can only tell them how I manage to do without a solution myself, and put before them the view of these matters which I hold till I can get a better, so that they may more readily enter into my views of Christ’s Laws of action, and understand what I write. The characteristics of our Lord’s ways which particularly bring us in contact with these mysteries, and which therefore concern us most now, are (1) His care to keep alive in His hearers their sense of being free and responsible agents; (2) His tolerance of the existence of evil in the world. These questions of free will and the existence of evil have been for ages the battle-ground of divines, and they come before us every day. “Why did not God make every one good?” is a question which occurs to every intelligent child. He runs to his first teachers with it, and finding himself put off with an answer that is no answer—for a child is quick in detecting this—he gets his first notion that there are matters which even grown-up people know nothing about. So, that I may not serve my readers in this way, I give them all I have myself. I can no more tell them “How” or “Why” God brought about the present state of things, than I can solve the great mystery which is at the bottom of all mysteries: “How, or Why, God and the world ever existed at all?” But I think I can shew that free agency in men, and the existence of evil, and also a reserve in the revelation of God’s ways—a question I shall have to deal with next—are consistent with our situation in this world; supposing that the mental and spiritual development of God’s creatures is the proximate end and aim of the Spiritual Order. Some hypothesis we must make as to a purpose in the world, if we regard it as the work of a _mind_; and this is the purpose which most seems to fall in with what I observe. Our Lord speaks of Divine action as “The mystery of the kingdom of God.”(6) He directs the thoughts of His disciples to these ways by telling them, not what they are, but to what they are _like_. We shall never, while on earth, perfectly know these ways, but Christ thinks it well for His disciples to strive after this knowledge, and to look for lessons in all they see to help them towards it.