A man's religion, in proportion to its depth, will move in a Concrete Time which becomes more and more a Partial Simultaneity. And these his depths then more and more testify to, and contrast with, the Fully Simultaneous, God. Because man thus lives, not in an ever-equal chain of mutually exclusive moments, in Clock Time, but in Duration, with its variously close interpenetrations of the successive parts; and because these interpenetrations are close in proportion to the richness and fruitfulness of the durations he lives through; he can, indeed he must, conceive absolutely perfect life as absolutely simultaneous. God is thus not Unending, but Eternal; the very fullness of His life leaves no room or reason for succession and our poor need of it. Dr. F. C. S. Schiller has admirably drawn out this grand doctrine, with the aid of Aristotle's Unmoving Action, in _Humanism_, 1903, pp. 204-27. We need only persistently apprehend this Simultaneity as essential to God, and Succession as varyingly essential to all creatures, and there remains no difficulty--at least as regards the Time-element--in the doctrine of Creation. For only with the existence of creatures does Time thus arise at all--it exists only in and through them. And assuredly all finite things, that we know at all, bear traces of a history involving a beginning and an end. Professor Bernardino Varisco, in his great _Know Thyself_, has noble pages on this large theme.[52] In any case we must beware of all more or less Pantheistic conceptions of the simultaneous life of God and the successive life of creatures as but essential and necessary elements of one single Divine-Creaturely existence, in the manner, e.g., of Professor Josiah Royce, in his powerful work _The World and the Individual_, 2nd series, 1901. All such schemes break down under an adequate realization of those dread facts error and evil. A certain real independence must have been left by God to reasonable creatures. And let it be noted carefully: the great difficulty against all Theism lies in the terrible reality of Evil; and the deepest adequacy of this same Theism, especially of Christianity, consists in its practical attitude towards, and success against, this most real Evil. But Pantheism increases, whilst seeming to surmount, the theoretical difficulty, since the world as it stands, and not an Ultimate Reality behind it, is held to be perfect; and it entirely fails really to transmute Evil in practice. Theism, no more than any other outlook, really explains Evil; but it alone, in its fullest, Jewish-Christian forms, has done more, and better, than explain Evil: it has fully faced, it has indeed greatly intensified, the problem, by its noble insistence upon the reality and heinousness of Sin; and it has then overcome all this Evil, not indeed in theory, but in practice, by actually producing in the midst of deep suffering, through a still deeper faith and love,