THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 53, Issue 3830, 6 November 1936, Page 3

THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

“SOME SOUL OF GOODNESS.” “The people who sit in ease in the floating palace of a luxury liner like the Queen Mary are debtors—whether they know it or not—to the immemorial tradition of a seafaring race, to sailors, craftsmen, brave and lonely heroes innumerable who have hazarded and given life through uncounted generations. ‘‘A study of history like that by Toynbee makes it clear that a challenging environment and man’s gallant response thereto have played the decisive role in the birth of civilisations; civilisations are not apt to be generated and cradled in environments which offer unusually easy or soft conditions of life. The Greek proverb stands: ‘The best things are difficult’; or, as in a more familiar tag: ‘No pains, no gains.’ “I hasten to add here that it is notoriously easy to preach smooth platitudes about the discipline of pain; they just nauseate us because they sound so cruelly complacent; we feel that we have no right to do anything in the presence of suffering but keep a reverent silence. We can all think of brave people who have been beaten down by blow after blow; they suffer in body and mind; they love their loved ones; the circumstances of their life seem pitilessly hard; to dare to speak words of comfort to them, or even to intrude upon their sorrows at all, seems almost like blasphemy. “For things evil are really evil, and even though they contribute to the existence of a greater good than is conceivable without them, they remain a grim riddle which no neat formula will solve. Nevertheless, the point which I am venturing to make here is the one which the sufferers themselves teach us; every hospital ward is eloquent of it; it is an abiding truth which only the sentimentalist will complacently affirm, but which only the'’cynic will bring himself to deny—that suffering, however cruel and undeserved, can and does ennoble men; it is often the occasion and the raw material of the greatest achievements of the human spirit. “ ‘There is some soul of goodness in things evil, Would men observingly distil it out.’ “That is true, though it is a truth which we can distort with disastrous ease. Shakespeare meant that since the possibility of evil is necessary to the good of the world, taken as a whole, man’s divinest endowment lies in the possibility of his triumph over evil, of his transformation of defeat into victory.”—Principal John S. Whale, M.A., of Cheshunt College, Cambridge.