turns them into advocates.  It organizes the dealers in drunkenness and debauchery into powerful societies for mutual protection.  It creates lobbies and controls legislatures.  It corrupts the government of great cities and rots out the social life of small towns.  Even when its outward manifestations are repressed and its grosser forms resisted, it steals its way into men’s hearts, eating out the roots of human trust and brotherhood and kindness, and filling the air with gossip and spite, envy, malice and all uncharitableness.

I am glad that since we have to live in a world where evil exists, we have a religion which does not bandage our eyes.  The first thing that we need to have religion do for us is to teach us to face the facts.  No man can come into touch with the Divine personality of Jesus Christ, no man can listen to His teaching, without feeling that the distinction between good and evil to Him is vital and everlasting.  The choice between them is to Him the great choice.  The conflict between them is to Him the great conflict.  Evil is the one thing that God has never willed.  Good is the one thing that He wills forever.  Evil is first and last a rebellion against His will.  He is altogether on the side of good.  Much that is, is contrary to His will.  There is a mighty strife going on, a battle with eternal issues, but not an eternal battle.  The evil that is against Him shall be cast out and shall perish.  The good that overcomes the evil shall live forever.  And those who yield their lives to God and receive His righteousness in Christ are made partakers of everlasting life.

This is the teaching of Jesus:  and I thank God for the honesty and virility of His religion which makes us face the facts and calls us to take a man’s part in the real battle of life.

II.  But what is the plan of campaign which Christianity sets before us?  In what spirit and with what weapons are we to enter the great conflict against the evil that is in the world?

The natural feeling of the heart in the presence of evil is wrath, and the natural weapon of wrath is force.  To punish crime, to avenge wrong, to put down wickedness with a strong hand,—­that is the first impulse of every one who has the instincts of manhood.

And as this is natural, so it is, also, within a certain sphere needful, and to a certain extent useful.  Armies and navies exist, at least in theory, to prevent injustice among nations.  Laws are made to punish wrong-doers.  Courts, police-forces, and prisons are maintained to suppress evil with power.

But while we recognize this method of dealing with evil as useful to a certain extent and necessary within a certain sphere, we must remember that it has its strict limitations.

First, it belongs to the state and not to the individual.  When the private man assumes to punish evil with force he sanctions lynch-law, which is a terror to the innocent as well as to the guilty.  Then we have the blood-feud and the vendetta, mob-rule and anarchy.