ful conditions upon which each person could not only abide in harmony with divine love, but find correction and recovery from evil.

We have seen the innocence of ignorant error, the minimum of guilt and harm attending error and sin, the corrective and disciplining tendency which love imposes upon error and sin, conditioning all persons with hope and help. We have recognized, also, that to each individual all the suffering of corrective chastisement is over-compensated by the resulting recovery of purity, strength, and endless development of character; that the ills imposed by heredity and environment cannot prevent this spiritual exaltation, but are made to contribute to it. The outraged consciousness of martyrdom, too, has its compensating triumph in the more immediate actualization of an ideal life.

All this wild and awful scene of wrong and suffering has its compensation only in love. Love, with its power to inspire and glorify the conscious spirit, to realize to that spirit the perfection of holiness, truth, beauty, and good; love, with its rapture ever transcending and outliving its pang, enduring its torture only to burst forth in proportionately larger development; love, with its implication of immortality and ever-advancing idealsis the consolation, as it is the source, of the universe. As love is the self-sufficient nature of the unconditioned reality, it is self-sufficient as the nature of a conditioned universe. Love, and immortality for love's sake, are the surviving, all-compensating factors which can

every error, sorrow, and repentance into the will's "armour of light," the knightly long-sufferer's cloth of gold.

Then let it be clearly recognized that however great

universe, it is the least that could be secured by the Creator, in proportion to the highest good of dependent persons; and that the greatness of its volume is due to these persons themselves who alone could have made it less. Let it be remembered, also, that, wherein it could not be prevented by divine love, it is held within conditions which provide for either its merciful remedy or its selfextinction. Nothing but an unreasoning, perverse devotion to sin can prevent its corrective chastening in any individual soul.

Thus it appears that the Creator, in choosing to create finite beings, but indulges love's eternal altruistic spirit, and gives it the most beneficent, because perfect, determination. He develops the ever-increasing good of his altruistic life as he ever realizes the infinite good of his unconditioned egoistic life. The evolution of love, advancing in its eternal process of altruistic determination, maintains the original unity of holiness and benevolence, and assures the ultimate oneness of the actual and the ideal universe.

ful conditions upon which each person could not only abide in harmony with divine love, but find correction and recovery from evil.

We have seen the innocence of ignorant error, the minimum of guilt and harm attending error and sin, the corrective and disciplining tendency which love imposes upon error and sin, conditioning all persons with hope and help. We have recognized, also, that to each individual all the suffering of corrective chastisement is over-compensated by the resulting recovery of purity, strength, and endless development of character; that the ills imposed by heredity and environment cannot prevent this spiritual exaltation, but are made to contribute to it. The outraged consciousness of martyrdom, too, has its compensating triumph in the more immediate actualization of an ideal life.

All this wild and awful scene of wrong and suffering has its compensation only in love. Love, with its power to inspire and glorify the conscious spirit, to realize to that spirit the perfection of holiness, truth, beauty, and good; love, with its rapture ever transcending and outliving its pang, enduring its torture only to burst forth in proportionately larger development; love, with its implication of immortality and ever-advancing idealsis the consolation, as it is the source, of the universe. As love is the self-sufficient nature of the unconditioned reality, it is self-sufficient as the nature of a conditioned universe. Love, and immortality for love's sake, are the surviving, all-compensating factors which can weave every error, sorrow, and repentance into the will's "armour of light," the knightly long-sufferer's cloth of gold.

Then let it be clearly recognized that however great

universe, it is the least that could be secured by the Creator, in proportion to the highest good of dependent persons; and that the greatness of its volume is due to these persons themselves who alone could have made it less. Let it be remembered, also, that, wherein it could not be prevented by divine love, it is held within conditions which provide for either its merciful remedy or its selfextinction. Nothing but an unreasoning, perverse devotion to sin can prevent its corrective chastening in any individual soul.

Thus it appears that the Creator, in choosing to create finite beings, but indulges love's eternal altruistic spirit, and gives it the most beneficent, because perfect, determination. He develops the ever-increasing good of his altruistic life as he ever realizes the infinite good of his unconditioned egoistic life. The evolution of love, advancing in its eternal process of altruistic determination, maintains the original unity of holiness and benevolence, and assures the ultimate oneness of the actual and the ideal universe.

CHAPTER IV

THE ATONING FACT

The ideal, to this summit God descends, man rises.-Victor Hugo.

Perfect action, which constitutes perfect being-the unconditioned, or infinite, person-we have found to be the original unit. The nature of that perfect action we have found to be an unconditioned, infinitely free life, devoted to the realization of absolute perfection; and that this self-enacted and perfectly adjusted nature is love. In a word, we have seen that perfect action is love; and that love is an order of self-determining action in which is realized infinite self-consciousness, or unconditioned egoism. Moreover, this perfect, love-achieved egoism affords conditions to perfect altruism without being conditioned by it, and thus the existence of persons, or a universe of persons, other than the Infinite Person, is possible and probable to our thought, as also certain to our experience.

In the determination, or carrying out, of perfect altruism we have seen the rise of relative consciousness in the Deity-the divine sonship-and also the putting forth of objective action by the divine Son in the creation of an objective universe of dependent persons.

We have also seen, in a former chapter, the genesis of evil, and the necessity of merciful benevolence as a condition to the existence of a perfect personal universe, and its solution of "the problem of evil." It has appeared, too, that this solution, whether in individual character or collective forms of life, is one in which through a long series of ages sin demonstrates its total lack of merit and its infinite demerit; and love proves its limitless altruis