In harmony with the foregoing principles, we must regard as established the following proposition: that evil is a creaturelove turned away from God, and therefore a false love, whether in the form of love of the world, i.e. disguised selfishness, or of spiritual selfishness.

6. EVIL AS FALSEHOOD.-We have seen indeed in general that evil is deficiency in true knowledge, nay error, and that both are pre-eminently involved in its sensuous form.1 But we must dwell longer on the aspect of evil in which it is untruth or falsehood, because this affords the means of tracing the history of the progress of evil with special distinctness." False love to the creature, apart from and instead of God, involves the error of supposing that the creature is the absolute good. But this intellectual error is not innocent; it cannot be forced on, but is adopted by, the will under the influence of false inclination to the creature without love to God. It is affirmed error; but a willing of untruth, although in selfdeception, is falsehood. Since all stages and forms of sin are false creature-love, it always involves the double falsehood, that in some way the creature is the highest good, and God not, and therefore that God is not God,—an imagination which subverts essential principles, conceiving to itself an universe in which the lowest has become highest, and the highest lowest. Evil is the imagining of a perverted world, which it treats as the true one, while treating the true as the perverted one. But as certainly as all evil involves falsehood essentially, so certainly does falsehood mark its history or its stages.

In

In the beginning it promises at a seemingly small price (namely a self-chosen single act, which will remain without further consequences) great gain and enjoyment, enhanced life in a corporeal or even spiritual sense, enhanced freedom. the beginning it denies its universal principle, so to speak, and does not permit particular evil to appear as evil in which an universal principle of evil is already implied, but entangles men in the notion, that good may retain its universal significance despite a single exception, or that the single evil action does not involve an attack on the law as a unity, and thus sinks men in partial unconsciousness. Further, in the beginning evil diminishes or denies the power belonging to it 1 1 § 76, p. 368; § 77, pp. 381, 385.

2 Gen. iii. 3 ff.

as a principle, and would have the good law acknowledged in general. It is thus hypocritical, and clothes itself in the veil of truth, because its true form would be too terrible. In this case it disguises its self-exaltation against God, and is cowardly through the self-esteem already latent in it.

But at the second stage it makes man a liar more definitely. If he comes to enjoy the blessings which had floated before his mind as the reward of sin, but which do not appease his hunger, as they cannot do, man deludes himself into supposing that a larger quantity or other kinds of finite blessings would fill the void. If he does not come to enjoy these blessings, he pushes restlessly on through falsehood into aggravated forms of evil. But even when they are reached, evil brings no enhanced sense of life, no enhanced freedom and harmony, because in such pursuits man contradicts his innermost nature or destiny. Conscience, whether he hears it or not, with its silent or loud accusation spoils his enjoyment and fills him with inner discord. Then the falsehood of sin imagines that an evil conscience is man's foe, and allures the will to covenant more firmly with evil against it. Thereupon, the more passive form passes into that of energetic and conscious evil volition up to the point of assenting to the very principle of evil. Now it strips away the veil, and appears in bold, naked form in opposition to morals and religion. It may then seem to have grown honourable in comparison with its beginning; but it is logical in the apparent inconsequence, it remains falsehood. If at first evil looked as if it were not in opposition to dependence on God in general, as if it had not the power and effect belonging to it, now, as bold, defiant wickedness, it ascribes to itself a power which it has not, figures as the really sole, true power in the world, in this way exercising a more agitating influence than in others upon the weak masses of mankind, and gaining a fearful power of contagion.

But in the third place, the liar, who has deceived others and tempted them to embrace the fundamental principle of evil, falls into his own net and betrays himself in a twofold way. First, in this way, that, as is well known, with practice in lying the fancy is connected, that the lies produced are truth, whilst the truth, which man dishonours, withdraws from him. To the liar his own lie returns in the form of a power over him, to

which he falls victim. This is the first punishment which he receives in virtue of a higher righteous government. But it is seen still more at the end that evil is self-betrayed, inasmuch as the reward, which was the bait at first (namely enhanced life, wellbeing, and freedom), instead of advancing step by step with the growth of evil, recedes more and more. When, then, selfishness has lost everything of sensuous and spiritual worth which it could command, while satiated with or weary of all that substance which apart from God can give no enduring satisfaction, then selfishness and caprice, because they have run through everything, and united with nothing true or abiding, are left wholly to themselves and their own emptiness. If even then guilt is denied, and the way to redemption thus cut off by pride and defiant scepticism, this darker selfishness may enkindle disgust with existence, rage against all being and life. Then, if the Ego is unwilling to give up its selfishness, nothing is left it but to be filled with negation and seek its happiness in destroying, thus falling a prey to the spirit of pure negation, which ends logically in spiritual murder, and does not even spare itself. How can sin be more plainly revealed as falsehood, than by the fact that the self-seeker, who virtually makes himself the centre of the world and would put himself in God's place, who seeks to deny both God and the good world, in order to build up a kingdom of his own, ends by logical sequence in the effort to plunge himself into the kingdom of nothingness? Thus evil is falsehood through its whole course. In the end it shows a terrible candour and honesty in disclosing its innermost secret-nothingness, death, whereas the divine order abides

firm.

7. THE RAMIFICATIONS OR POSITIVE FORMS OF EVIL.-The positive forms of evil, in no way identical with its stages, must be distinguished from the nature of evil in its two chief forms and stages; for the same positive form may belong to very different stages intrinsically, and the same stage may have different positive forms. But this much is implied in the distinction of the stages, that the first will lean more to sins of passivity, enjoyment, weakness, and cowardly lying; the second more to sins of false strength and active energy, to pride and arrogance, ambition and greed of honour. We shall most accurately

describe the different positive forms of evil, by considering that in different ways they desecrate or corrupt the system of blessings through sensuous or spiritual selfishness. Different instincts and capacities in man himself correspond to these blessings, so that the corruption of objective blessings always recoils upon the subject, who is himself a little world, a system of blessings, and introduces disorder into that world. These blessings, capable of corruption by grosser or finer selfishness, or by spiritual selfishness, are, first, of a finite kind. To this class belongs, firstly, the physical, corporeal nature,-its strength, harmony, beauty. The sin related to this blessing is lust of the flesh and lust of the eyes in the widest compass, sensuality, intemperance, corruption of imagination, and on the other side the sin of arrogant contempt of the body through false spirituality. Fleshly lust corrupts as well its object (the connection of sensuality with cruelty is well known) as the subject himself and his organism. This is especially seen in the effect on that basis of human society-marriage and the family. Secondly, the perversion of the instinct of property. This on the one side is avarice and covetousness, on the other extravagance and arrogant contempt. The man of great selfconceit who boasts extravagantly of his contempt for money and means, by this very act attributes too great importance to it, namely, as if a purely negative relation thereto were enough to confer dignity and distinction on man. But the covetous and avaricious man expects more power from his means, and becomes a servant of Mammon. of the instinct of power, honour, and tion, greed of honour, lust for praise; cringing, servility, and self-effacement. The issue of greed of honour and ambition is to make others selfless instruments for one's own glory. They imply, therefore, contempt for the dignity of personality; and yet power and honour only possess worth on the supposition that others are not contemptible, and that they render free tribute of acknowledgment. But still servility and cringing, through dissimulation, seek only their own, and in their own way make others mere instruments. Thus all these forms carry contradiction in themselves, and are only able to corrupt God's blessings and gifts and to im

1 1 John ii. 16.

Finally, the perversion influence becomes ambiand on the other hand,

poverish man, not to build a harmonious, happy world upon the ruins of the law.

But evil corrupts and destroys blessings of no mere finite order. So in general the blessing of communion. Sensuous evil, like spiritual, is unloving, nay, comes into conflict with the claims of others, and thus as matter of course developes into hate. But it especially corrupts the different spheres of moral communion, in which as many kinds of blessing are included: Art and Science, State and Church. First, by deifying even their finite side. In every one of these, by virtue of their idea, something divine and of infinite value is contained, but in none per se the highest good. Again, conversely by dishonouring them. As sin treats blessings merely finite in kind as infinite, so it treats the infinite in these blessings of the second species as finite. These higher blessings show their more than merely finite character in this, that they do not necessarily belong to one or a few exclusively, but may be common property without loss to the individual. But even

into these higher spheres, in which by their nature the spirit of the universal ought to rule, sin penetrates with corrupting or destroying effect. Science and art do not guard against it, although the eternal shines in them. Art may be degraded to mere sensuous enjoyment, and science to an instrument of intellectual pride. On the other side, there is certainly a sinful contempt of science and art, through rough practicality or false spirituality, which prides itself upon itself, and thus thinks it right to despise divine gifts in God's name. But State and Church also may be corrupted, as by deification, so by dishonour or desecration, either by contempt and indifference, or by being degraded into mere instruments to the egoistic Ego, and made the arena of Egoism, especially of thirst for honour and ambition. But Egoism is the more hateful in these spheres, because it must unite with hypocrisy, since every one knows that these spheres demand honest surrender and living public spirit, enthusiasm for the spread of truth and beauty in science and art, patriotism in the State, selfforgetting humility and love, sincere piety, in the Church, and also that all influence would be forfeited by the avowal of the impure spirit, which, instead of treating these spheres as holy ground, seeks to make them subservient to egoistic interests.