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, if we and our fellow-men had seen more clearly and followed more faithfully the guiding star of the good.

And then, out of the judgment of regret, springs the deeper judgment of condemnation.  If the failure in duty was not inevitable, then it was base.  The false word, the unjust deed, the foul action, seen as a surrender to evil, appears hateful and guilty.  It deserves the indignation and the shame which attach to all treason.  And the spirit which lies behind all these forms of disloyalty to the good,—­the spirit which issues in selfishness and sensuality, cruelty and lust, intemperance and covetousness,—­this animating spirit of evil which works against the Divine will and mars the peace and order of the universe is the great Adversary against whom we must fight for our own lives and the life of the world.

All around us lies his dark, secret kingdom, tempting, threatening, assaulting the soul.  To ignore it, is to walk blindfold among snares and pitfalls.  Try if you will to shut it out, by wrapping your heart in dreams of beauty and joy, living in the fair regions of art or philosophy, reading only the books which speak of evil as if it did not exist or were only another form of goodness.  Soon you will be shaken out of the dream into the reality.  You will come into contact with evil so close, so loathsome that you can not deny it.  You will see that it has its soldiers, its servants, its emissaries, as ardent and enthusiastic in its cause as if they were serving the noblest of masters.  It inspires literature and supports newspapers; now intelligent and cultured, drawing the arts into its service; now coarse and vulgar, with pictures that shock the taste as much as they debase the conscience.  It wins adherents and