So the American and English school tells us it lives only in the obsolete theology.

Evil, we are told, "is good in another way we are not skilled in."[32] So says the author of "Representative Men." "Evil," according to old philosophers, "is good in the making; that pure malignity can exist is the extreme proposition of unbelief.

It is not to be entertained by a rational agent.

It is Atheism; it is the last profanation." "The divine effort is never relaxed; the carrion in the sun will convert itself into grass and flowers; and man, though in brothels, or jails, or on gibbets, is on his way to all that is good and true."[33] Emerson, in a lecture in Cincinnati, is reported by the editor of _The Central Herald_, as saying in his hearing: "To say that the majority of men are wicked, is only to say that they are young." "Every man is indebted to his vices--virtues grow out of them as a thrifty and fruitful plant grows out of manure." "There is hope even for the reprobate, and the ruffian, in the fullness of time." If these were only the ravings of lunatics, or the dreamings of philosophers, we should never have hunted them from their hiding-places to scare your visions; but these doctrines are weekly propounded in your own city, and throughout our land, from platform and press, to thousands of your children and their school-teachers, of your work, men and your lawgivers, to your wives and daughters.

Again and again have our ears been confounded in the squares of New York, and the streets of Philadelphia, and the market-places of Cincinnati, by the boisterous cry, _What is sin?
There is no sin.