When we once shake ourselves loose from these mythical, gnostic and rabbinical ideas, with their legal and poetical conceptions of ethics, and their naive picture of the world as the seat of ethical forces struggling in a physical way against one another; when we once realize that it is meaningless to apply ethical distinctions to matter, we are led to press past these Hellenistic accretions to the simpler and nobler traditions which Christianity inherited from Jesus and the greater Hebrew prophets. Here, if anywhere, religion is in a position to solve the problem of evil. There are passages in the New Testament which breathe the same faith as that held by Deutero-Isaiah, a sort of sublime religious optimism or will to believe. For the Hebrew prophet of the exile, God is the creator and righteous ruler of the earth. "I am the Lord and there is none else. I form the light and create darkness; I make peace and _create evil_; I am the Lord that doeth all these things." Such is monotheism of the creationalistic type in all its vigor and challenging fervor. Yet the prophet speaks and thinks in terms of world-movements and the fate of nations, and his thoughts scarcely drop from this vast setting to consider the fates of individuals. We should note further the absence of the poly-demonism {159} of later Judaism and the evident impatience with the ancient myths and the belief in a Satan or Spirit of Evil. Had Christianity taken its departure from this high altitude, it would have been more truly monotheistic, but it would not have been the child of its age, and would not have been assimilated by the Mediterranean peoples. Let us examine the implications of this bolder and simpler faith. There can be little doubt that the position adopted by the second Isaiah is the logical terminus of monotheism. If God be omnipotent, he must be responsible for all the evil in the world as well as for the good. In other words, this must be the best of all possible worlds. He who is a king, and not a marionette, cannot beg off from the duties of his station. To introduce Sin as a sort of hellish entity, as did Saint Augustine, is to mar our conception of deity. We no longer have that old Roman's courtier-like sycophancy, nor his nonchalance when others are condemned by divine caprice to the eternal flames. What was to him a means of manifesting God's greater glory is to us a crime which would sully our ideal of goodness. The educated world of to-day has at least come up to the level of the peasant-poet's indictment of the Calvinism of two centuries ago.