as yesterday when it is past. We have not the faculties which fit us for rapid movements and vast achievements. We need to be conducted by easy and circuitous courses. "Lofty heights must be ascended by winding paths." "We have not wings, we cannot soar, But we have feet to scale and climb By slow degrees, by more and more, The cloudy summits of our time." It must be added that whoever acknowledges Christianity to be a revelation from God, must see in it reasons which go far to explain the permission of sin. There is, it is true, in the authoritative records of the Christian religion, the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures, no explanation of the origin of moral evil as a speculative problem. The account of the first parents of the human race introducing sin into the world by yielding to the seduction of a being who had himself sinned, is wholly of a historical character, and can neither be compared nor contrasted with the theories of philosophers as to the nature, possibility, and cause of sin. To measure the one by the others, or to set the one over against the others, is to do injustice both to Scripture and philosophy. But the whole scheme of Christianity must seem to those who accept it the strongest possible of practical grounds for the Divine permission of man's abuse of freewill. The existence of sin has, according to the Christian view, been the occasion and condition of a manifestation of the Divine character far more glorious than that which had been given by the creation of the heavens and the earth. It called forth a display of justice, love, and mercy before which all moral beings in the universe may well bow down in wonder and adoration, and man especially with unspeakable gratitude. If God has really manifested Himself in Christ for the reconciliation of the world to Himself, His permission of sin has certainly to all practical intents been amply justified.