nd sinners.
Genuine satans, as Milton knew, are not weaklings and traitors who
have declined from the standards of a respectable civilization. They
are positive and impressive figures pursuing and acting up to their
own ideal of conduct, not fleeing from self-accepted retribution or
falling away from a confessed morality of ours. Evil is a force even
more than a folly; it is a positive agent busily building away at the
City of Dreadful Night, constructing its insolent and scoffing society
within the very precincts of the City of God.

He must know, then, that evil and suffering are not temporary elements
of man's evolution, just about to be eliminated by the new reform,
the last formula, the fresh panacea. To those who have tasted grief
and smelt the fire such easy preaching and such confident solutions
are a grave offense. They know that evil is an integral part of our
universe; suffering an enduring element of the whole. So he must
preach upon the chances and changes of this mortal world, or go to
the house of shame or the place of mourning, knowing that there is
something past finding out in evil, something incommunicable about
true sorrow. They are not external things, alien to our natures, that
happen one day from without, and may perhaps be avoided, and by and
by are gone. No; that which makes sorrow, sorrow, and evil, evil, is
their naturalness; they well up from within, part of the very texture
of our consciousness. He knows you can never express them, for truly
to do that you would have to express and explain the entire world.
It is not easy then to interpret the evil and suffering which are not
external and temporary, but enduring and a part of the whole.

So the preacher is never dealing with plain or uncomplicated matters.
It is his business to perceive the mystery of iniquity in the saint
and to recognize the mystery of godliness in the sinner. It is his
business to revere the child and yet watch him that he may make a
man of him. He must say, so as to be understood, to those who balk at
discipline, and rail at self-repression, and resent pain: you have
not yet begun to live nor made the first step toward understanding the
universe and yourselves. To avoid discipline and to blench at pain is
to evade life. There are limitations, occasioned by the evil and the
suffering of the world, in whose repressions men find fulfillment.
When you are honest with yourself you will know what Dante meant when
he said: