Moreover, since equality of need among men,[60] implies, as we have seen, a common capacity--even if in varying degrees--of entering into the most fundamental interests of life, this belief in the essential likeness of men is likely to carry with it that most wholesome conviction for theology, that the great universal qualities and interests are the most valuable. Not that which distinguishes us from one another, but that which we have in common is most valuable. As Howells tells the boys in his _A Boy's Town_, "the first thing you have to learn here below, is that in essentials you are just like every one else, and that you are different from others only in what is not so much worth while."[61] This consideration is no small help in facing that most difficult problem for any ideal view of the world--the problem of evil. In God's world, we feel that the most common things ought to be the best. And this growing conviction of the social consciousness comes in to confirm our faith. The constant and simple insistence of Christ on receptivity as a fundamental quality in his kingdom is built, in fact, on an optimistic faith in the value of the common things. It is interesting to notice the varied confirmations of the value of the common. How often we have to feel that the deepest discussions come out with only deeper insight into the great common truths; and, on the other hand, that in stilted philosophizing, what seems at first sight a great discovery, proves only a perversely obscure way of putting a common truth. It is the very mission of genius--of the poet in the larger sense, we are coming to feel, to bring out the value of the common. His distinctive mark is that he has kept a fresh sense for the great common experiences of life. So Kipling prays: "It is enough that through Thy grace I saw naught common on Thy earth. Take not that vision from my ken." So, the greatest in art, Hegel contends, has a universal appeal. It is a wholesome and heartening conviction, I say, to bring into theology, that the really best things are common, accessible to all, actually shared in, to an extent beyond that which our superficial vision seems to show. For, after all, this conviction of the social consciousness is only bringing home to us, in a new and appreciable way, Christ's own optimism and his own faith in the love of the Father. It is only another illustration of Fairbairn's principle of the Christian consciousness becoming more Christian, and so better able to understand and interpret Christ.