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I

THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

“And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”—Genesis vi. 5.

That we may appreciate this discussion, removed as far as possible from theological terminology and theories, and get a concrete view-point, the following head-lines from a single issue of a metropolitan daily will suffice: “War Clouds Hanging Low;” “Men Higher Up Involved;” “Eighty-seven Divorces On Docket;” “Blood Flows In the Streets;” “Gaunt Hunger Among Strikers;” “Arrested For Forgery;” “A White Slave Victim;” “Attempted Train Robbery;” “Kills Wife and Ends Own Life;” “Two Men Bite Dust;” “Investigate Bribery.”

This fearful list may be duplicated almost every day in the year. Our land is deluged with crime, without respect to person or place; its blight touches all circles from the slum to the four hundred. Wealth and poverty, culture and ignorance, fame and obscurity, suffer alike from this Pandora Box scourge. The march of history—the pilgrimage of the race, has enjoyed but little respite from tears and blood. Those who strive to maintain a standard of purity, righteousness, and honour, are beset by strange, powerful, intangible influences, from the cradle to the grave. The child in swaddling clothes has a predisposition to willfullness, deception, and disobedience; paroxysms of passion and anger are manifested with the slightest provocation.

Notwithstanding the barriers thrown up by the home and society; the incentives and assurances for noble, industrious living, the dykes are continually giving way, so that police power and the frowning walls of penal institutions are insufficient to check the overflow. The Church of God, with its open Book, ringing out messages of life and hope at every corner; the object lessons on the “wages of sin,” sweeping in full view before us, like the reel-film of a motion picture—do not seem to lessen the harvest of moral shipwreck.

According to some recent police records and statistics, only about one-half of the country’s criminals are apprehended; if this is true of those who violate the law, a much smaller per cent. of those who break the perfect moral law, as related to domestic and religious life, are ever exposed. When these facts are considered, the perspective for the reign of righteousness is lurid and hopeless. The country has been amazed, recently, at the revelations of how municipal and national treasuries are being looted by extortion, extravagance, and misrule, on the part of men holding positions as a sacred trust. Civilization fosters and maintains a traffic which has not one redeeming feature; besides killing directly and indirectly more men daily than were blown up in the battle-ship Maine.

Let us view the problem of evil from another angle: a writer on the subject of food supplies says the earth each year furnishes an abundant quantity of fruits, meats, cereals, and vegetables to feed all her peoples; yet gaunt famine is never entirely removed. Even in America a surprising per cent. of our people are underfed and underclothed. “Fifty thousand go to bed hungry every night in New York City,” declares a