398 LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY

competently even according to his own limited lights; but his work is a
hideous failure; and this failure must be due either to incompetence or
to malevolence. Even if the Creator were to be acquitted on the charge
of wilful malice, he would have to be convicted of being either culpably
unaware of his wantonly assumed responsibilities or else no less culpably
indifferent to them; and either of these verdicts would be damning in
the judgement of a decently human jury; for no human being who was
not shockingly obtuse or callous could imagine himself ever having had
the heart, if he had been creating morally irresponsible sentient living
organisms, to victimize his own creatures by enduing them with the
capacity to suffer when he was not endowing them with any capacity to
turn suffering to moral account. It would have been still harder for him
to imagine himself ever having implanted, in any morally responsible
sentient living creatures of his, the capacity not only to suffer but to sin
without having made sure in advance that he would never be driven by
force of circumstances to lead these human beings into temptation and
would always be sufficiently master of the situation to be able to deliver
them from evil.

'That there is a "soul of good in things evil" is unquestionable; nor will
any wise man deny the disciplinary value of pain and sorrow. But these
considerations do not help us to see why the immense multitude of
irresponsible sentient beings, which cannot profit by such discipline,
should suffer; nor why, among the endless possibilities open to omni-
potence-—that of sinless, happy existence among the rest—the actuality in
which sin and misery abound should be that selected.'1

When a human soul thus finds itself confronted with two numinous
presences which are morally antithetical2 to one another, yet which,
none the less, both have to be recognized as being indubitably divine,
the most obvious conclusion is that there must be, not one god, but two
gods, in the Universe; and this argument came home ad hominem to the
writer of this Study when, with the present chapter in mind, he was
reading simultaneously Adolf von Harnack's Morcion, the Gospel of the
Stranger God, and Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki*

'They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters,
these see the works of the Lord, and His wonders in the deep.'4

But they that go down to the sea, not in a ship, but on a balsa-log sieve,
see works of God the Creator that are yet more wondrous and appalling
than any that discover themselves to seafarers who 'plough across* the
water, in latter-day Western style, 'with roaring engines and piston-
strokes',5 'The sea contains many surprises for him who has his floor on
a level with the surface and drifts along slowly and noiselessly' ;6 and in
the experience of the crew of the Kon-Tiki most of these surprises were

------------f-----r------------------0----work (published as a commentary on a Bible

composed of expurgated versions of some of Saint Paul's Epistles and of the Gospel
according to Saint Luke) bore the expressive title Antitheses.

3 Heyerdahl, T.: Kon-Tiki, Across the Pacific by Raft (Chicago 1950, Rand McNally).

* Ps. cviii, w. 23-24.

s Heyerdahl, op. cit., p. 117. & ibid., p. 117.