[Footnote A: As in the case of lesson viii and ix it is thought that the brief treatis which is here given on "The Problem of Moral Evil" will be more serviceable than detached notes, and hence it is given in their stead. It might be well also to assign the subject of the lesson to one of the more experienced of the elders for a discourse, giving ample time for preparation.] NOTES. _1. The Problem of the Existence of Moral Evil:_ The existence of evil in the world has ever been a vexed problem for both theologians and philosophers, and has led to the wildest speculations imaginable. It will be sufficient here, however, if I note the recognition by high authority of the difficulties involved in the problem. Of those who have felt and expressed these difficulties, I know of no one who has done so in better terms than Henry L. Mansel in his celebrated Lectures on "The Limits of Religious Thought" (1858), in the course of which he says: "The real riddle of existence--the problem which confounds all philosophy, aye, and all religion too, so far as religion is a thing of man's reason, is the fact that evil exists at all; not that it exists for a longer or a short duration. Is not God infinitely wise and holy and powerful now? and does not sin exist along with that infinite holiness and wisdom and power? Is God to become more holy, more wise, more powerful hereafter; and must evil be annihilated to make room for his perfections to expand? Does the infinity of his eternal nature ebb and flow with every increase or diminution in the sum of human guilt and misery? Against the immovable barrier of the existence of evil, the waves of philosophy have dashed themselves unceasingly since the birthday of human thought, and have retired broken and powerless, without displacing the minutest fragment of the stubborn rock, without softening one feature of its dark and rugged surface." This truly great writer then proceeds by plain implication to make it clear that religion no more than philosophy has solved the problem of the existence of evil: "But this mystery, [i. e. the existence-of evil], vast and inscrutable as it is, is but one aspect of a more general problem; it is but the moral form of the ever-recurring secret of the Infinite. How the Infinite and the Finite, in any form of antagonism or other relation, can exist together; how infinite power can co-exist with finite activity;'how infinite wisdom can co-exist with finite contingency; how infinite goodness can co-exist with finite evil; how the Infinite can exist in any manner without exhausting the universe of reality;--this is the riddle which Infinite Wisdom alone can solve, the problem whose very conception belongs only to that Universal Knowledge which fills and embraces the Universe of Being."