apparently despised because it was the fashionable doctrine of
the sage bard's day:--

All nature is but art . . .
All discord harmony not understood;
All partial evil universal good.--(Essay 289-292.)

The Pilgrim holds with St. Augustine Absolute Evil is impossible
because it is always rising up into good. He considers the theory
of a beneficent or maleficent deity a purely sentimental fancy,
contradicted by human reason and the aspect of the world. Evil is
often the active form of good; as F. W. Newman says, "so likewise
is Evil the revelation of Good." With him all existences are
equal: so long as they possess the Hindu Agasa, Life-fluid or
vital force, it matters not they be,--

Fungus or oak or worm or man.

War, he says, brings about countless individual miseries, but it
forwards general progress by raising the stronger upon the ruins
of the weaker races. Earthquakes and cyclones ravage small areas;
but the former builds up earth for man's habitation, and the
latter renders the atmosphere fit for him to breathe. Hence he
echoes:

--The universal Cause
Acts not by partial but by general laws.

Ancillary to the churchman's immoral view of "original sin" is
the unscientific theory that evil came into the world with Adam