The discovery of the Law of Evolution has already done much to solve the mystery of evil. Catastrophism is a corollary of it: if there were no imperfection there could be no advance. Evil comes from a lack of balance between forces. When balance is disturbed--by anything from indigestion in a protozoon up to a storm on the ocean where he lives, there is a catastrophe. Evil is not a positive thing, but merely lack of the good, or lack of proportion in the good--inadequacy or excess, the excess being when a force or a passion good in itself exceeds the forces that usually keep it within bounds--when one force of those that hold the earth's crust in equilibrium becomes excessive, and there is earthquake; when love of country seeks to expand it, at the expense of other countries, and there is war; when the appetite that creates and conserves property exceeds the respect for the rights of others, and there is theft or robbery or even murder; when the passion that perpetuates the race grows to excess, and its rightful result in the family is prevented or destroyed, often with attendant deceit, violence, murder. When Rochefoucauld said: "Our virtues are most frequently but vices disguised," he said an impossible thing, and spoke, as most proverb makers do, from mere habit of paradox and love of it. He would have told a fundamental truth, however, if he had said: Our vices are most frequently but virtues disguised--by inflation. But deeper in the individual soul than any of these problems, is one that Evolution has as yet directly done little to clarify. In substituting for Providence, a wisdom that (so far as our poor wits can state the conditions) provided for the exigencies beforehand by Law, instead of constantly handling them as they arise, Evolution raises the question: How far down into the details of our lives does the law go? Of all questions bearing upon our lives, there is but one deeper and more anxious: Does the law work out for good as far as it goes? Perhaps the answer can be settled only by experience, and judgment depends largely on temperament. And yet experience has provided all thinking peoples with expressions that assert a favorable solution. Job was not the first to say: "Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him." All literatures abound in such expressions, as Pope's All chance, direction, which thou canst not see; All discord, harmony not understood; All partial evil, universal good: And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite, One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right. (Never deny that it's as near right as it _can_ be.) And there are many such expressions as Tennyson's Oh yet we trust that somehow good Will be the final goal of ill, or as Paul's Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth, or Shakespear's There is some soul of goodness in things evil, or Thomson's From seeming evil still educing good, or Emerson's Every evil [has] its good.