To this nature, thus receptive, God addresses Himself. He is the Father, the absolute Love, and his desire is to lead men upward towards the height of divine perfection. In all ages, in every way, he has been trying to do this; and all nature, all art, all literature is full of this affection for his child. Even the Pagan myths express this striving of God with man. The existence of what we call evil is assumed, but there is no attempt to explain it or theorize about it or reconcile it with any mode of philosophy. To us it may be simply the divine effort to startle the soul into a consciousness of itself. Even the worst forms of doubt, of denial, of atheism may be parts of this divine effort; even men like Strauss and Feuerbach may be witnesses for truth, because they drive men back in horror from the pit of disbelief, and compel them to take refuge through tears and prayers in the supreme love. Of absolute evil we cannot be sure that there is any; so many ways must the infinite spirit have to awaken men to a sense of their own destiny. I cannot better convey my thought than by recounting the essence of two sermons that I heard some years ago from eminent preachers in different American cities; the first was on the death of Charles Darwin. After a very ornate service, the minister dwelt enthusiastically on the merits of Darwin as a philosopher, described his system, and declared that his own belief in the Deity of Christ, was confirmed in large measure by Darwin's theory of the Selection of the Fittest. The statement was startling at first, for the two doctrines seemed to point in opposite directions, but the speaker probably meant that the Christ expressed all the potentialities of human nature; that he was the Fittest; not a miracle, not an exception to humanity, but the perfection of man; in other words, a divine person. The other sermon turned on the murder of Sisera (Judges iv, 18), as contrasted with a statement in the first epistle of John (iv, 8), "God is love." The rector spoke of the assassination of Sisera in terms of extreme abhorrence; called it treacherous, cruel, base, and then said: "See what progress the human mind has made from this period to that when John was written." The common impression is that the _human_ mind had nothing to do with it, it being the _divine_ mind that was alone in question. But what the preacher meant was evidently this,--either that the divine mind dropped thoughts into the human mind as fast as they could be appreciated, or that the human mind, imperfect in development, apprehended all that it could of the perfect mind. Whichever case we assume, the integrity of the divine mind is secured, and at the same time the growth of the human.