This brings us to the mystery of the “origin of evil.” I shall not lay myself open to the charge made against divines, “That they no sooner declare a subject to be a mystery than they set to work to explain it.” I can see that if man is to be left free, evil must needs come, and that without evil in the world none of the more masculine virtues can be brought to the birth—that is to say, I see that evil, being in the world, serves to discharge a function—but I do not pretend to say how it came. I do not maintain that it came, solely, from man’s misuse of his freedom. From what we see in the world arises a fancy that every thing must have its opposite, that light presupposes darkness, and pleasure pain, and so good may presuppose evil; but this fancy is not substantial enough to build upon. Our Lord’s words on the occasions when He deals with evil, are, to my judgment, most easily reconciled with one another, and with the circumstances which call them forth, by supposing Him to recognise a personal spiritual influence, presenting evil thoughts to the minds of men; the man remaining free to choose whether he will entertain these suggestions or not. I return to my immediate subject—the function that evil performs in the existing moral world. We read in the Book of Genesis that the earth was to bring forth “thorns and thistles,” and that man was “to eat bread in the sweat of his brow.”(7) This is the result of a change worked, we are told, “for man’s sake.” It was indeed for man’s _sake_—though in a different sense—that this was so. He would have remained a very poor creature if the earth had produced just what he wanted, without any labour of his. This illustrates the function of evil in the ordering of the world. Man’s qualities, moral and physical, are developed by it. It subserves the progress of the human race. We should have less heroism, without cruelty and oppression from without; and could have no self-restraint, without temptation from within. Piety and love indeed, when they had once come into being, might exist without evil; we may believe that they satisfy the souls of the saints in heaven; but among men they commonly owe their birth to a feeling of shelter against evil, and to a sense of pardoned wrong.