have happened
otherwise than just as it has come to pass. Such a theory of the
universe blots out all difference between good and evil except in name.
It leaves the fence-posts standing, but it takes away the rails, and
throws everything into one field of the inevitable.

You will find the same falsehood in a more crude form in the popular
teachings of what men call "the spirit of the age," the secular spirit.
According to these doctrines the problem of civilization is merely a
problem of ways and means. If society were better organized, if wealth
were more equally distributed, if laws were changed, or perhaps
abolished, all would be well. If everybody had a full dinner-pail,
nobody need care about an empty heart. Human misery the secular spirit
recognizes, but it absolutely ignores the fact that nine-tenths of human
misery comes from human sin.

You will find the same falsehood disguised in sentimental costume in the
very modern comedy of Christian Science, which dresses the denial of
evil in pastoral garb of white frock and pink ribbons, like an innocent
shepherdess among her lambs. "Evil is nothing," says this wonderful
Science. "It does not really exist. It is an illusion of mortal mind.
Shut your eyes and it will vanish."

Yes, but open your eyes again and you will see it in the same place, in
the same form, doing the same work. A most persistent nothing, a most
powerful nothing! Not the shadow cast by the good, but the cloud that
hides the sun and casts the shadow. Not the "silence implying sound,"
but the discord breaking the harmony. Evil is as real as the fire that
burns you, as the flood that drowns you. Evil is as real as the typhoid
germ that you can put under a microscope and see it squirm and grow.
Evil is negative,--yes, but it is a real negative,--as real as darkness,
as real as death.

There are two things in every human heart which bear witness to the
existence and reality of evil: first, our judgments of regret, and
second, our judgments of condemnation.

How often we say to ourselves, "Would that this had not come to pass!"
How often we feel in regard to our own actions, "Would that I had done
differently!" This is the judgment of regret; and it is a silent witness
of the heart to the conviction that some things are not inevitable. It
is the confession that a battle has been lost which might have been won.
It is the acknowledgment that things which are, but are not right, need
not have been, i