He indeed can give to evil such vitality that it can defy Him for
ever, then He is creating a power that is stronger than Himself.

While the mystery of evil is unexplained, we must all be content to
know that we do not know; for the thing is insoluble by human
thought. If God be all-pervading, all-in-all, it is impossible to
conceive anything coming into being alien to Himself, within
Himself. If He created spirits able to choose evil, He must have
created the evil for them to choose, for a man could not choose
what did not exist; if man can defy God, God must have given him
the thought of defiance, for no thought can enter the mind of man
not permitted by God.

With this mystery unsolved, we cannot pretend to any knowledge of
spiritual things; all that we can do is to recognise that the
principle of Love is stronger than the principle of evil, and cling
so far as we can cling to the former. But to set ourselves up to
guide and direct other men, as the preacher did whose words I have
quoted, is to set oneself in the place of God, and is a detestable
tyranny. Only by our innate sense of Justice and Love can we
apprehend God at all; and thus we are safe in this, that whenever
we find any doctrine preached by any human being which insults our
sense of justice and love, we may gladly reject it, saying that at
least we will not believe that God gives us the power, on the one
hand, to recognise our highest and truest instincts, and on the
other directs us to outrage them. Such teaching as this we can
infallibly recognise as a human perversion and not as a divine
message; and we may thankfully and gratefully believe that the
obstacles and difficulties, the temptations and troubles, which
seem to be strewn so thickly in our path, are to develop rather