In my Prayer Journal...

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Well, these are our two starting points. In one way (our old phrase!) God includes evil, in another way he does not. What are we to do next? My beginning of the `next' will be to deny another remark of yours - where you say `no good without evil'. This on my view is absolutely untrue: but the opposite `no evil without good' is absolutely true. I will try to explain what I mean by an analogy.

Supposing you are taking a dog on a lead through a turnstile or past a post. You know what happens (apart from his usual ceremonies in passing a post!). He tries to go the wrong side and gets his lead looped round the post. You see that he can't do it, and therefore pull him back. You pull him back because you want to enable him to go forward. He wants exactly the same thing - namely to go forward: for that very reason he resists your pull back, or, if he is an obedient dog, yields to it reluctantly as a matter of duty which seems to him to be quite in opposition to his own will: tho' in factit is only by yielding to you that he will ever succeed in getting where he wants.

Now if the dog were a theologian he would regard his own will as a sin to which he was tempted, and therefore an evil: and he might go on to ask whether you understand and `contained' his evil. If he did you cd. only reply `My dear dog, if by your will you mean what you really want to do, viz. to get forward along the road, I not only understand this desire but share it. Forward is exactly where I want you to go. If by your will, on the other hand, you mean your will to pull against the collar and try to force yourself forward in a direction which is no use - why I understand it of course: but just because I understand it (and the whole situation, which you don't understand) I cannot possibly share it. In fact the more I sympathise with your real wish - that is, the wish to get on - the less can I sympathise (in the sense of `share' or `agree with') your resistance to the collar: for I see that this is actually rendering the attainment of your real wish impossible.'

I don't know if you will agree at once that this is a parallel to the situation between God and man: but I will work it out on the assumption that you do.  --C.S. Lewis