It is an age-old commonplace of spiritual writers that God is mysteriously nearer to those who would flee ‘the world’ and seek him alone in solitude. Such writers can justifiably point to the orgins of monastic life in the deserts of Egypt, as also to the constant renewal of a monastic ideal by a return to the desert as can be seen in Cîteaux's efforts. In our own day a Père de Foucauld lived and died like an eremite of old; and that precious life and death would seem to have begotten a thriving new spiritual movement in the Church. That solitudes and deserts can foster and nurture spiritual realities is certainly a traditional and valid theme. We can always retain the doggerel-like text ‘O beata solitudo, O sola beatitudo’ ('Blest solitude, our solitary bliss’).

Why does God permit evil? It is a fatal timidity which induces us nowadays to pre-occupy ourselves exclusively with the apologetic aspects of this problem. A significant train of thought in the Bible invites us to see it from a far bolder, and I think from a more sublime, point of view. If we follow this train of thought we shall want not so much to apologize (in any possible sense of the word) for the fact of evil in the world, not so much to ‘reconcile it with God's goodness as to glory in its being there for him to conquer. For it pertains to God's glory that there should be positive forces of evil in the world, and that they should strive actively against his holy will—and not only that they should strive, but that they should seem for a time to prevail against him.