I could wish myself that, in popular religious teaching, there was a franker conception of this position--a position which, as I have said, is really implied in the Theodicies of all the Divines. Popular unbelief--and sometimes the unbelief of more cultivated persons--rests mainly upon the existence of evil. We should cut at the roots of it by teaching frankly that this is the best of all possible Universes, though not the best of all imaginable Universes--such Universes as we can construct in our own imagination by picturing to ourselves all the good that there is in the world without any of the evil. We may still say, if we please, that God is infinite because He is limited by nothing outside His own nature, except what He has Himself caused. We can still call Him Omnipotent in the sense that He possesses all the power there is. And in many ways such a belief is far more practically consolatory and stimulating than a belief in a God who can do all things by any means and who consequently does not need our help. In our view, we are engaged not in a sham warfare with an evil that is really {86} good, but in a real warfare with a real evil, a struggle in which we have the ultimate power in the Universe on our side, but one in which the victory cannot be won without our help, a real struggle in which we are called upon to be literally fellow-workers with God. LITERATURE The subject is more or less explicitly dealt with in most of the works mentioned at the end of the last two lectures, and also in books on Moral Philosophy too numerous to mention. Classical vindications of the authority of the Moral Consciousness are Bishop Butler's _Sermons_, and Kant's _Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals_ and other ethical writings (translated by T. K. Abbott). I have expressed my own views on the subject with some fullness in the third book of my _Theory of Good and Evil_. [1] See especially Book II. Lect. iii. [2] 'We do not infer a character to be virtuous, because it pleases: but in feeling that it pleases after such a particular manner, we in effect feel that it is virtuous.' (_Treatise_, Part I, Section ii., ed. Green and Grose, vol. ii. p. 247.) 'The distinction of moral good and evil is founded in the pleasure or pain, which results from the view of any sentiment, or character; and as that pleasure or pain cannot be unknown to the person who feels it, it follows that there is just so much virtue in any character as every one places in it, and that 'tis impossible in this particular we can ever be mistaken.' (_Ibid._ vol. ii. p. 311.)