However, granted the correctness of this assumption, it is not comprehensible how evil came into the world. It contradicts all attributes with which faith has endowed the deity. It cannot appear without God's knowledge, for He is omniscient and nothing is hidden from Him. It cannot occur against His will, for He is omnipotent and nothing resists His bidding. But least of all can it rage with His knowledge and consent, for He is infinitely good and therefore does not permit his creatures to fall victims to evil. But experience teaches us that evil has a permanent place in human life, and this forces one to the conclusion that either God is hard and cruel, and therefore not infinitely good and not Morality itself, or that He has no knowledge of evil and therefore is not omniscient, but, on the contrary, blind as well as stupid, or that He sees the evil but cannot prevent it, and therefore is not omnipotent and must recognize the existence of higher powers than Himself against whom He is impotent.
These terrifying conclusions have not escaped the notice of the devout, and they have always made the most desperate efforts to evade them. Some have chosen the easiest way out of the difficulty; they close their eyes before the yawning abyss, fold their hands devoutly and invent pious phrases about the inscrutable ways of Providence and its infinite wisdom, which the weak intelligence of mortals cannot grasp. Others take infinite pains; in the sweat of their brow they with difficulty evolve tortuous and hypocritical explanations, which in reality explain nothing, but in a mind which lends itself willingly to them give rise to the illusion that the contradiction has been solved. Perhaps the most astounding piece of work accomplished by this miserable juggling, or this delusion of self by means of an exuberant flow of words, is presented in the four volumes of the "Théodicée," by which Leibnitz made himself a laughing-stock. Mazdeism has invented an alluring but at the same time risky expedient. It lightly assumes that two principles obtain in the universe, a good one and a bad one, the creator and the destroyer, the merciful God and the cruel demon, Ormuzd and Ahriman. In this way everything is easy to understand. Good is the work of radiant Ormuzd, evil the deed of dark Ahriman. The two fight together with very nearly equal forces, but this doctrine reveals the comforting prospect of a distant future in which Ormuzd shall finally triumph over Ahriman, and fills the trembling believer with elation at the thought that after æons of the tragic struggle between good and evil, at the end of the world the curtain will fall on the victory of good. By this victory Mazdeism, which claims to be monotheistic, rescues its single god, although the introduction of a second principle of very nearly equal power, which holds the one god in check for an immeasurable period of time, brings this system perilously close to polytheism.