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whosoever smiteth thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also." The originality of this ethic is incomparable.^
2. But there is an extended application to the words of the text. The inspired maxim includes all forms of evil, and there is no form of evil by which we are to allow ourselves to be over- come. What, then, is evil ? How can we define it ? Evil, like good, is one of those very wide and comprehensive words which, when we want to put our ideas into shape and order, urgently require definition, and which, nevertheless, by reason of their very width and comprehensiveness, almost refuse to be defined. But let us go to the root of the matter. What is evil in its root ? Simply this. It is unregulated desire. Desire is that quality in men which corresponds to gravitation in the physical bodies, which, while all is well with us, keeps us moving around our true centre, the Being of beings — God. Sin is the free concentration of desire upon some other centre than God, that is, upon some created being ; and just as if, in the heavenly spheres, a planet could get detached from its true orbit — from loyal revolutions around its proper sun — and could thus come within the range of other and counteracting attractions, the effect would be vast and irretrievable disaster, so is it in the moral world. Sin is this disorder in the governing desires of the soul, followed by a corresponding disorder in its outward action.
3. Evil is the work not of God but of the creature. God could not directly have created evil without denying Himself. Evil is a result of the abuse of God's highest gift to created beings — their free will. Evil is the creature repudiating the law of its being by turning away its desire from Him who is the source, the centre, the end of its existence. If it be urged that God, in making man free, must have foreseen that man would thus abuse his freedom, it must be replied that God's horizons are wider than ours, and that we may not unreasonably believe that He foresaw, in the very cure of evil, a good which would more than compensate for its existence — that, as the Apostle puts it, if sin abounded grace would much more abound.
^ Every one knows that microbes are a cause of disease. It is a great wonder, seeing that there are so many microbes about,
' W. L. Watkinsoji.
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that we keep as well as we do. But the reason why we keep well has been explained. In Pasteur's laboratory in Paris a Eussian physiologist named Metschnikoff has found out the secret, and he tells us how it is they are not so deadly as other- wise they might be. He has proved that certain cells contained in the blood, now called phagocytes, commonly known as the white corpuscles of the blood, have the power of independent motion. That is to say, they not only travel with the blood as it flows through the arteries and veins, but they can go anywhere in the body if they so choose. These phagocytes wander about in the blood, even make their way inside the tissue, and, wonderful to relate, they pursue, devour, and digest these deadly disease- producing microbes. They are like guardian angels of the body. Now there is something very similar going on in our spiritual life. St. Paul said : " When I would do good, evil is present with me." We have all felt like that, and we all have the same war going on in our inmost being. When we disobey God, we always know what we ought to do — there is the good voice struggling to warn and crush the bad tendency. Conscience is a fine phagocyte. Listen to it always, and the deadly microbe of wrong-doing will soon be overtaken and slain. Your soul's life will thus become healthy, strong, and noble.^
ii. The warning.
"Be not overcome of evil." Those words contain at once a warning of danger and an encouragement to resistance. They assume, as all Scripture does, that there is such a thing as evil, that it is around us, that contact with it is inevitable, that defeat and ruin by it are not impossible. It would be a shallow and a false philosophy, it would be a treacherous and apostate religion which should attempt to conceal this from us, or to tell us that the hard, narrow, up-hill path to heaven is smooth, and easy and strewn with roses. To our first parents the school of evil was Paradise itself. Esau was bred in the noble simplicity of the patriarch's tent; the sons of Eli within the curtains of God's bright sanctuary ; Manasses in the pure palace of a royal saint; Judas among the chosen ones of the heavenly Kingdom, and in daily intercourse with the Son of God Himself. Yet what became of them? Esau grew into a coarse, sensual hunter; the sons of Eli were sons of Belial; Manasses was a foul apostate; and for Judas, the thief, the traitor, the son of perdition, it were
' J. Learmount.
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better that he had not been born. So it is God's will that man should be liable everywhere to the possibilities of evil. But — " resist the devil, and he will flee from you."