'I see everything,' he cried, 'everything that there is. Why does each thing on the earth war against each other thing? Why does each small thing in the world have to fight against the world itself? . . . So that each thing that obeys law may have the glory and isolation of the anarchist. So that each man fighting for order may be as brave and good a man as the dynamiter. So that the real lie of Satan may be {251} flung back in the face of this blasphemer, so that by tears and torture we may earn the right to say to this man, "You lie!" No agonies can be too great to buy the right to say to this accuser, "We also have suffered." 'It is not true that we have never been broken. We have been broken upon the wheel. . . . We have descended into hell. We were complaining of unforgettable miseries even at the very moment when this man entered insolently to accuse us of happiness. I repel the slander; we have not been happy.'[20] But the charge of happiness is to be repelled as a slander only because there are real sufferers in the world to make the charge. It is, after all, not happiness but insensibility which is the real disgrace. If the suffering is real, not to see it, not to feel it, not to heal it, is intolerable. To say, however, that suffering is wilfully caused in order that it may eventually contribute to an ultimate reconciliation, is to charge God with something worse than complacency. If life is a real tragedy it can be endured, and to enter into it will bring the deep satisfaction which every form of heroism affords. But if the tragedy of life be preconceived and wilfully perpetrated, it must be resented for the sake of self-respect. Even man possesses a dignity which is not consistent with puppetry and mock heroics. Moral idealism means to interpret life consistently with ethical, scientific, and metaphysical truth. It endeavors to justify the maximum of {252} hope, without compromising or confusing any enlightened judgment of truth. In this it is, I think, not only consistent with the spirit of a liberal and rational age, but also with the primary motive of religion. There can be no religion with reservations, fearful of increasing light. No man can do the work of religion without an open and candid mind as well as an indomitable purpose. I can not here elaborate the evidence upon which moral idealism is grounded; but it might be broadly classified as ethical, cosmological, and historical. The ethical ground of moral idealism is the virtual unity of life, the working therein of one eventual purpose sustained by the good-will of all moral beings. The cosmological proof lies in the moral fruitfulness and plasticity of nature. The historical proof lies in the fact of moral progress, in the advent and steady betterment of life. VII