intelligence of man, age after age, from the first throb of feeling,
the first ray of thought; that involuntary evil, that unmerited
suffering, that impotent pain,--the human debris of the social
process,--which is a challenge to the power of God, and a cry to the
heart of man that broods over it in vain, yet cannot choose but hear. In
this region the near affinity of realism to pessimism, to atheism, is
plain enough; its necessary dealing with the base, the brutal, the
unredeemed, the hopeless darkness of the infamies of heredity, criminal
education, and successful malignity, eating into the being as well as
controlling the fortune of their victims, is manifest; and what answer
has ever been found to the interrogation they make? It is not merely
that particular facts are here irreconcilable; but laws themselves are
discernible, types even not of narrow application, which have not been
brought into any relation with what I have named the divine order.
Millions of men in thousands of years are included in this holocaust of
past time,--eras of savagery, Assyrian civilizations, Christian
butcheries, the Czar yet supreme, the Turk yet alive.

And how is it at the other pole of mystery, where life rises into a
heavenly vision of eternities of love to come? There is no place for
realism here, where observation ceases and our only human outlook is by
inference from principles and laws of the ideal world as known to us;
yet what problems are we aware of? Must,--to take the special problem of
art,--must the sensuous scheme of life persist, since of it warp and
woof are woven all our possibilities of communication, all our
capabilities of knowledge? it is our language and our memory alike. Must
God be still thought of in the image of man, since only in terms of our
humanity can we conceive even divine things, whether in forms of mortal
pleasure as the Greeks framed their deities, or in shapes of spiritual
bliss as Christians fashion saint, angel, and archangel? These are