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 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