74/115 SPIRITUAL CONSCIOUSNESS By FRANK H. SPRAGUE
What explanation can be offered of experiences commonly termed “evil” pain, suffering, conflict, death, and the like.” How can their presence in the world be reconciled with the existence of a Supreme Being who “is love”? What are their true values in the picture of life? How shall we properly estimate their worth in the grand total of experience?
Distinctions of good and evil originate in the mind of the thinker; they are not inherent in objects. Objective expressions are pronounced good or bad, according to our attitude toward them. “Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
A thing, event or condition may appear at one time good, and at another, bad, according to the way it is viewed the light in which it is seen. These distinctions are matters of consciousness. An experience which, regarded by itself, is suggestive of evil, may be deemed good when considered in its relation to some larger end.
A picture without lights and shades would be anomalous; the execution of a picture is effected by intelligently observing their gradations, and adjusting them in such relative proportions that each will play its part most effectually in producing the general result.
But it is possible to scrutinize the picture so closely that we shall find in it little else than mere technical details of shading. In one sense, this estimate of it is literally correct. Studied solely with reference to color-gradation, it consists primarily of shades.
They are its life; they give it character and emphasize its bright features; the strength and disposition of its shadows determine its effectiveness. But this estimate is decidedly inadequate from a genuinely critical standpoint. Such observations may be perfectly correct as far as they extend;
but other considerations are indispensable, if even the faintest appreciation of the deeper significance of the picture as a work of art is to be obtained. Its worth depends on the manner in which it portrays ideas that must be interpreted through qualitative as well as quantitative relations.