Christ’s Cross is the proof that God suffers more than man from human sin, and Christ’s judgment will show that the wicked cannot always prosper. In Christ alone we find the key to the dark problems of history and the guarantee of human progress. _Rom. 3:25_—“_whom God set forth to be a propitiation, through faith, in his blood, to show his righteousness because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime in the forbearance of God_”; _8:32_—“_He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not also with him freely give us all things?_” _Heb. 2:8, 9_—“_we see not yet all things subjected to him. But we behold ... Jesus ... crowned with glory and honor_”; _Acts 17:31_—“_he hath appointed a day in which he will judge the earth in righteousness by the man whom he hath ordained._” See Hill, Psychology, 283; Bradford, Heredity and Christian Problems, 240, 241; Bruce, Providential Order, 71-88; J. M. Whiton, in Am. Jour. Theology, April, 1901:318. G. A. Gordon, New Epoch of Faith, 199—“The book of Job is called by Huxley the classic of pessimism.” Dean Swift, on the successive anniversaries of his own birth, was accustomed to read the third chapter of Job, which begins with the terrible “_Let the day perish wherein I was born_” (_3:3_). But predestination and election are not arbitrary. Wisdom has chosen the best possible plan, has ordained the salvation of all who could wisely have been saved, has permitted the least evil that it was wise to permit. _Rev. 4:11_—“_Thou didst create all things, and because of thy will they were, and were created._” Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 79—“All things were present to God’s mind because of his will, and then, when it pleased him, had being given to them.” Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 36, advocates a realistic idealism. Christianity, he says, is not abstract optimism, for it recognizes the evil of the actual and regards conflict with it as the task of the world’s history; it is not pessimism, for it regards the evil as not unconquerable, but regards the good as the end and the power of the world.