 Royce embraced a theistic process metaphysics that recognizes evil as a real force and suffering as an irreducible fact of experience. In “The Problem of Job” Royce addressed the traditional problem of evil: “Grant Job’s own presupposition that God is a being other than this world, that he is its external creator and ruler, and then all solutions fail. God is either then cruel or helpless, as regards all finite ill of the sort that Job endures.” If we consider that God is not a separate being, then “When you suffer, your sufferings are God’s sufferings, not his external work, not his external penalty, not the fruit of his neglect, but identically his own personal woe. In you God himself suffers, precisely as you do, and has all your concern in overcoming this grief.” Grief is not “a physical means to an external end,” but rather “a logically necessary and eternal constituent of the divine life” (McDermott 1969, 843). Though Royce believed that events are collectively tending toward an ultimate reconciliation in the eternal perspective of the Beloved Community, they are not erased even in that ideal perspective. The events of life (joyful and sorrowful alike) persist, both as experiences of the individuals who undergo them and also as God’s own experiences.