ABSTRACT
The greatest of all perplexities in theology has been to reconcile the infinite goodness of God with his omnipotence. The solutions which have been proposed neglect one or the other of the attributes of God: tacitly or otherwise either his infinite power or his infinite love is denied. The change of attitude toward evil is not, as at first perhaps it may seem, merely a new way of talking about the same thing. It alters radically the nature of evil itself. For evil is not a quality of things as such. It is a quality of our relation to them. A dissonance in music is unpleasant only to a musical ear. The realization that evil exists only because people feel it to be painful helps them not only to dissociate it from this aura of dread but to dissociate ourselves from their own feelings about it.
