One of the heresies for which the Jesuits got that spiritual genius, Molinos, the founder ofQuietism, so abominably condemned was his healthy-minded opinion of repentance:- "When thou fallest into a fault, in what matter soever it be do not trouble nor afflict thyself for it.

For they are effects of our frail Nature, stained by Original Sin. The common enemy will makethee believe, as soon as thou fallest into any fault, that thou walkest in error, and therefore art outof God and his favor, and herewith would he make thee distrust of the divine Grace, telling thee ofthy misery, and making a giant of it; and putting it into thy head that every day thy soul growsworse instead of better, whilst it so often repeats these failings. O blessed Soul, open thine eyes;and shut the gate against these diabolical suggestions, knowing thy misery, and trusting in themercy divine. Would not he be a mere fool who, running at tournament with others, and falling inthe best of the career, should lie weeping on the ground and afflicting himself with discourses uponhis fall? Man (they would tell him), lose no time, get up and take the course again, for he that risesagain quickly and continues his race is as if he had never fallen. If thou seest thyself fallen onceand a thousand times, thou oughtest to make use of the remedy which I have given thee, that is, aloving confidence in the divine mercy. These are the weapons with which thou must fight andconquer cowardice and vain thoughts. This is the means thou oughtest to use--not to lose time, notto disturb thyself, and reap no good."[68]

[68] Molinos: Spiritual Guide, Book II., chaps. xvii., xviii. abridged.

Now in contrast with such healthy-minded views as these, if we treat them as a way ofdeliberately minimizing evil, stands a radically opposite view, a way of maximizing evil, if youplease so to call it, based on the persuasion that the evil aspects of our life are of its very essence,and that the world's meaning most comes home to us when we lay them most to heart. We havenow to address ourselves to this <129> more morbid way of looking at the situation. But as Iclosed our last hour with a general philosophical reflection on the healthy-minded way of takinglife, I should like at this point to make another philosophical reflection upon it before turning tothat heavier task. You will excuse the brief delay.

If we admit that evil is an essential part of our being and the key to the interpretation of our life,we load ourselves down with a difficulty that has always proved burdensome in philosophies ofreligion. Theism, whenever it has erected itself into a systematic philosophy of the universe, hasshown a reluctance to let God be anything less than All-in-All. In other words, philosophic theismhas always shown a tendency to become pantheistic and monistic, and to consider the world as oneunit of absolute fact; and this has been at variance with popular or practical theism, which latterhas ever been more or less frankly pluralistic, not to say polytheistic, and shown itself perfectlywell satisfied with a universe composed of many original principles, provided we be only allowedto believe that the divine principle remains supreme, and that the others are subordinate. In thislatter case God is not necessarily responsible for the existence of evil; he would only beresponsible if it were not finally overcome. But on the monistic or pantheistic view, evil, likeeverything else, must have its foundation in God; and the difficulty is to see how this can possiblybe the case if God be absolutely good. This difficulty faces us in every form of philosophy inwhich the world appears as one flawless unit of fact. Such a unit is an INDIVIDUAL, and in it theworst parts must be as essential as the best, must be as necessary to make the individual what he is;since if any part whatever in an individual were to vanish or alter, it would no longer be THATindividual at all. The philosophy of absolute idealism, so vigorously represented both in Scotland and America to-day, has to struggle with this difficulty quite as <130> much as scholastic theismstruggled in its time; and although it would be premature to say that there is no speculative issuewhatever from the puzzle, it is perfectly fair to say that there is no clear or easy issue, and that theonly OBVIOUS escape from paradox here is to cut loose from the monistic assumption altogether,and to allow the world to have existed from its origin in pluralistic form, as an aggregate orcollection of higher and lower things and principles, rather than an absolutely unitary fact. For thenevil would not need to be essential; it might be, and may always have been, an independent portionthat had no rational or absolute right to live with the rest, and which we might conceivably hope tosee got rid of at last.

Now the gospel of healthy-mindedness, as we have described it, casts its vote distinctly for thispluralistic view. Whereas the monistic philosopher finds himself more or less bound to say, asHegel said, that everything actual is rational, and that evil, as an element dialectically required,must be pinned in and kept and consecrated and have a function awarded to it in the final system oftruth, healthy-mindedness refuses to say anything of the sort.[69] Evil, it says, is emphaticallyirrational, and NOT to be pinned in, or preserved, or consecrated in any final system of truth. It is apure abomination to the Lord, an alien unreality, a waste element, to be sloughed off and negated,and the very memory of it, if possible, wiped out and forgotten. The ideal, so far from being coextensivewith the whole actual, is a mere EXTRACT from the actual, marked by its deliverancefrom all contact with this diseased, inferior, and excrementitious stuff.

[69] I say this in spite of the monistic utterances of many mind-cure writers; for these utterancesare really inconsistent with their attitude towards disease, and can easily be shown not to belogically involved in the experiences of union with a higher Presence with which they connectthemselves. The higher Presence, namely, need not be the absolute whole of things, it is quitesufficient for the life of religious experience to regard it as a part, if only it be the most ideal part.

Here we have the interesting notion fairly and squarely presented to us, of there being elementsof the universe which may make no rational whole in conjunction with the other elements, andwhich, from the point of view of any system which those other elements make up, can only beconsidered so much irrelevance and accident--so much "dirt," as it were, and matter out of place. Iask you now not to forget this notion; for although most philosophers seem either to forget it or todisdain it too much ever to mention it, I believe that we shall have to admit it ourselves in the endas containing an element of truth. The mind-cure gospel thus once more appears to us as havingdignity and importance. We have seen it to be a genuine religion, and no mere silly appeal toimagination to cure disease; we have seen its method of experimental verification to be not unlikethe method of all science; and now here we find mind-cure as the champion of a perfectly definiteconception of the metaphysical structure of the world. I hope that, in view of all this, you will notregret my having pressed it upon your attention at such length.

Let us now say good-by for a while to all this way of thinking, and turn towards those personswho cannot so swiftly throw off the burden of the consciousness of evil, but are congenitally fatedto suffer from its presence. Just as we saw that in healthy-mindedness there are shallower andprofounder levels, happiness like that of the mere animal, and more regenerate sorts of happiness,so also are there different levels of the morbid mind, and the one is much more formidable than the other. There are people for whom evil means only a mal-adjustment with THINGS,  one's life with the environment. Such evil as this is curable, in principle at least,upon the natural plane, for merely by modifying either the self or the things, or both at once, thetwo terms may be made to fit, and all go merry as a marriage bell again. But there are others forwhom evil is no mere relation of the subject to particular outer things, but something more radicaland general, a wrongness or vice in his essential nature, which no alteration of the environment, orany superficial rearrangement of the inner self, can cure, and which requires a supernaturalremedy. On the whole, the Latin races have leaned more towards the former way of looking uponevil, as made up of ills and sins in the plural, removable in detail; while the Germanic races havetended rather to think of Sin in the singular, and with a capital S, as of something ineradicablyingrained in our natural subjectivity, and never to be removed by any superficial piecemealoperations.[70] These comparisons of races are always open to exception, but undoubtedly thenorthern tone in religion has inclined to the more intimately pessimistic persuasion, and this wayof feeling, being the more extreme, we shall find by far the more instructive for our study.

[70] Cf. J. Milsand: Luther et le Serf-Arbitre, 1884, passim with her, he would sanction everything at oncehe answered. .