ible world becomes again hard reality, which we experience and try to comprehend, just because we know that in itself this world is once for all comprehended.
Practically then, in dealing with the world of
concrete facts, we must be realistic. It is our duty, for
humanity’s sake, to study and to believe in this
external world, to have faith in the great postulates of
common sense, to use all the things of the world.
But the basis of this faith common sense can never
find. And we have found it in the Absolute.
V.
Have we then discovered that something of infinite religious worth of which we went in quest? Or can we say that our life is in vain in such a world? Truly our religious longing has met with a genuine response, but it was not such a response as we at first expected, nor such as most systems appear to desire. Personal needs and hopes apart, most men who make systems to satisfy the impersonal religious longing, seek to prove that the world as a whole progresses towards goodness, so that, in the great consummation of this progress, evil shall certainly and finally disappear, leaving the world as innocent and insipid as in the days of Eden. Now we have found a thought that makes this concept of progress not only wholly inapplicable to the world of the infinite life, but wholly superfluous. If, as we insisted above, moral goodness is not the absence, but the organic subordination, of the evil will, its overthrow in
