Every war that has swept the world, from that of Chedorlaomer to that of Europe to-day, has driven this mystery of evil into the foreground of consciousness, wherever the dark trail of ruin and devastation and myriad woe has lain, or lies, across the lives and hearts of men. Now, as always, burning homes, ruined business, masses of slain, maimed bodies, the welter of animal instincts, the suffering of women and little children, and the hates enflamed between races form the greatest summation of baffling evils that man has known. But it is an interesting fact that the mysteries referred to by the greatest prophets of the soul are not of this dark and baffling type. They are mysteries of light rather than mysteries of darkness. Christ speaks of “the mystery of the Kingdom of God.” Saint Paul finds the central mystery to be an incarnational revelation of a suffering, loving God, who re-lives His life in us, and the author of the Epistle to Timothy announces “the great mystery of _godliness_.”[4] Love is put above all mysteries; the gospel of grace is more “unsearchable” than any suffering of this present time, and the real mystery is to be found rather in resurrection than in death: “Behold I show you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed and the dead shall be raised.” Science has confirmed this emphasis of the spiritual prophets. We come back from the greatest books of the present time with the same conclusion as this of the New Testament that the prime mysteries of the world are mysteries of goodness and not of evil; of light and not of darkness. We can pretty easily understand how there should be “evil” in a world that has evolved under the two great biological conditions: (1) Every being that survives wins out because he is more physically fit than his neighbors in the struggle for existence, and (2) there is a tendency for all inherited traits to persist in offspring. In order to have “nature” at all, there must be a heavy tinge of redness in tooth and claw. The primitive passions must be strong in order to insure any beings that can survive. And if there is to be inheritance of parental traits, then the tendencies of bygone ages are bound to persist on, even into a world of more highly evolved beings, and there will be inherited “relics” of fears, of appetites, of impulses, of instincts, and of desires, as there are inherited “relics” in the physical structure, and men will continue to do things which would better suit the animal level. And, finally, if the world is to be made by evolving processes, there will of necessity be an overlapping of “high” and “low.” The world cannot _go on_ without carrying its past along with the advancing line, so that in the light of the new and better that comes, the old and out-passed seems “evil” and “bad.”