The Pilgrim holds with St. Augustine Absolute Evil is impossible because it is always rising up into good. He considers the theory of a beneficent or maleficent deity a purely sentimental fancy, contradicted by human reason and the aspect of the world. Evil is often the active form of good; as F. W. Newman says, “so likewise is Evil the revelation of Good.” With him all existences are equal: so long as they possess the Hindu Agasa, Life-fluid or vital force, it matters not they be,— Fungus or oak or worm or man. War, he says, brings about countless individual miseries, but it forwards general progress by raising the stronger upon the ruins of the weaker races. Earthquakes and cyclones ravage small areas; but the former builds up earth for man’s habitation, and the latter renders the atmosphere fit for him to breathe. Hence he echoes: —The universal Cause Acts not by partial but by general laws. Ancillary to the churchman’s immoral view of “original sin” is the unscientific theory that evil came into the world with Adam and his seed. Let us ask what was the state of our globe in the pre-Adamite days, when the tyrants of the Earth, the huge Saurians and other monsters, lived in perpetual strife, in a destructiveness of which we have now only the feeblest examples? What is the actual state of the world of waters, where the only object of life is death, where the Law of murder is the Law of Development? Some will charge the Hâjî with irreverence, and hold him a “lieutenant of Satan who sits in the chair of pestilence.” But he is not intentionally irreverent. Like men of far higher strain, who deny divinely the divine, he speaks the things that others think and hide. With the author of “Supernatural Religion,” he holds that we “gain infinitely more than we lose in abandoning belief in the reality of revelation”; and he looks forward to the day when “the old tyranny shall have been broken, and when the anarchy of transition shall have passed away.” But he is an Eastern. When he repeats the Greek’s “Remember not to believe,” he means Strive to learn, to know, for right ideas lead to right actions. Among the couplets not translated for this eclogue is:— Of all the safest ways of Life the safest way is still to doubt, Men win the future world with Faith, the present world they win without. This is the Spaniard’s:— De las cosas mas seguras, mas seguro es duvidar; a typically modern sentiment of the Brazen Age of Science following the Golden Age of Sentiment. But the Pilgrim continues:— The sages say: I tell thee no! with equal faith all Faiths receive; None more, none less, for Doubt is Death: they live the most who most believe.