Christianity has deep words to say about evil and pain as being salutary and for our good, and about submission to God’s will as being better than wild wishes to be delivered now and at once from all pain and sorrow.  But it begins with full admission that evil is evil, and all its teachings presuppose that.  Job was tormented by the well-meaning platitudes of his friends, who lifted up their hands in holy horror that he did not lie on his dunghill, as if it had been a bed of roses; and Job, who felt all the sorrow of his losses and ground out many a wrong saying between his teeth, was justified because he had held by the truth that his senses taught him, that pain was bitter and bad, and by the other which his faith taught him, that God must be good.  He could not reconcile them.  We can in part; but our Lord has taught us in this prayer that it is not to be done by denying or sophisticating facts.  Then let us use this prayer in all its breadth, and feel that it covers all which makes our hearts heavy, and all which makes our consciences sore.

’From all evil and mischief—­plague, pestilence, and famine, as well as envy, hatred, and hypocrisy—­from sin, from the crafts and assaults of the devil,—­Good Lord, deliver us.’  ’In all time of our tribulation; in all time of our wealth, in the hour of death, and in the day of judgment,—­Good Lord, deliver us.’

II.  The unity and source of the evil.

The singular number suggests that all evil, multiform as it seems, is at bottom one.  It is a great weltering coil, but wilderness and tangle as it appears, there is a tap root from which it all comes, like a close-clinging mass of ivy which is choking the life out of an elm-tree.  If that root were grubbed up, all would fall.  It is like some huge sea monster ‘floating many a rood,’ but there is only one life in it.  The hydra has a hundred heads, but one heart.  And the place in the prayer in which this clause comes suggests what that is—­sin.

That place implies that all human sorrows and sufferings are consequences of human evil.  And that is true inasmuch as many of them are distinctly and naturally its results.  Disease is often the result of dissipation, poverty of indolence, friendlessness of selfishness.  How many of the miseries of our great cities, how many of the miseries of nations, result from criminal neglect and injustice!  ’Man’s inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn.’  Ah! if all men were saying from the heart, ‘Thy will be done,’ how many of their griefs would be at an end!  And it is true that sorrows are the consequences of sin inasmuch as suffering has been introduced by God into the world because of sin.  He has been forced by our rebellion to use judgments, and that to bring us back.

And it is true that sorrows are the consequences of sin inasmuch as the sting is taken out of them when our sins are forgiven and we love God.  Then they so change their characters as scarcely to deserve to be called by their old name, and the paradox, ‘sorrowful yet always rejoicing,’ becomes a sober fact of experience.