If what we call humanity is nothing but the good part of it, we can only vindicate its goodness at the expense of its strength.

Evil is at least an equal match for it, and in most of the battles hitherto it is evil that has been victorious.

But to conceive of good in this way is really to destroy our conception of it.

Goodness is in itself an incomplete notion; it is but one facet of a figure which, approached from other sides, appears to us as eternity, as omnipresence, and, above all, as supreme strength; and to reduce goodness to nothing but the higher part of humanity--to make it a wavering fitful flame that continually sinks and flickers, that at its best can but blaze for a while, and at its brightest can throw no light beyond this paltry parish of a world--is to deprive it of its whole meaning and hold on us.

Or again, even were this not so, and could we believe, and be strengthened by believing, that the good in humanity would one day gain the victory, and that some higher future, which even we might partake in by preparing, was in store for the human race, would our conception of the matter then be any more harmonious?
As we surveyed our race as a whole, would its brighter future ever do away with its past?
Would not the depth and the darkness of the shadow grow more portentous as the light grew brighter?
And would not man's history strike more clearly on us as the ghastly embodiment of a vast injustice?
But it may be said that the sorrows of the past will hereafter be dead and done with; that evil will literally be as though it had never been.