The animating principle of the Christian life is love: the Christian life at every stage is shot through with suffering. God is good and omnipotent: physical and moral evil never cease to abound. The least reflective intelligence is apt to be given pause by these conjunctions. To face the attacks of unbelievers and to reduce, if may be, our own perplexities, we do well to draw certain distinctions. God is perfect but the creatures he made could not fail to be imperfect. A greater good is achieved by creating free intelligent beings whose nature involves a real possibility of moral evil than by refraining from communicating his being beyond the confines of the inner life of the Trinity. Crudely, the order we must see things in is: God, angels, satan, man capable of achieving destiny without falling into moral evil, man falling into moral evil with consequent privation of supernatural and preternatural attributes, man restored to the supernatural, i.e., heaven made available, but without the preternatural impassibility, immortality, etc. And that brings us to ourselves. All this is penny catechism matter, but worth having in mind, if we are to avoid asking ourselves questions which have no legitimacy for Christian men.