misses, indeed, some of the principal means by which the good qualities of character are nurtured and maintained. There can be no question that many of the most substantial virtues of mankind. are acquired by struggle with and conquest over evil. The finite moral consciousness itself appears to have been wrought out under the stern discipline of experience, to which the primitive human and ante-human races were subjected in the struggle for existence. And the education of this moral faculty, from its first rude manifestations to its present height of culture, has been by no smooth. road, by no course of easy lessons, but by the severest conflict and battle with hindering conditions, in short, by constant struggle with opposing evils. Whatever theories and fancies we may like to entertain of a possibly better world than our own, in which men should have been gifted from the outset with only virtuous desires and capacities, that certainly is not the plan of the world we live in. Virtue, according to the plan of our world, is a possession which man is to achieve by his career, not an endowment with which he sets out. There may be certain graces of character, certain excellences of spiritual temperament and moral disposition, with which, especially at this stage of hereditary moral accumulation, individual human beings may be born. But virtue is a quality of character that is not born, that does not appear in cradles, but has to be earned by the solid moral labor of life; and whoever starts with

hereditary advantages at birth is only put under obligation to earn more, to reach a higher standard of virtue, than he who comes into existence weighted with an inheritance of moral evil. But, however we begin, it is the plan of the world we inhabit that a large measure of the discipline by which our moral education is secured comes through our necessary contact with evil. This is the school where the sinews of our virtue grow, and moral character is strengthened and established. So long as the moral ideal keeps its supremacy and enlightened conscience holds sway within, evil, whether it present itself in the form of moral transgression or of outward calamity, is only a challenge to more heroic self-command and to braver deeds of mental or moral conquest. In that conflict between the moral law that presses upon the conscience and the pressing, tempting thing which that law condemns, virtue is hammered and shaped into personal character. Out of this struggle in some one of its forms, with inward temptations or with outward evil conditions and wrongs, have appeared the heroes whom we honor, the saints whom we reverence and love, the philanthropists and prophets of all ages who still teach us to-day by their word and example. Upon man himself, indeed, has been placed the dignity and responsibility of detecting and overcoming the evil that besets his race, and thereby creating moral character and establishing society on a moral basis.

Many souls, it is true, in their earthly career appear to have succumbed in the struggle to the strong power of evil. With many more it has apparently been a drawn battle. But, with the world at large, and considering the whole history of the race, though the expression may seem a paradox, it is true that mankind has grown and thriven in virtue on the moral evils it has had to encounter. Think of the true and holy men, the noble women, whose lives are held in grateful remembrance for what they became and did, because the presence of human woe about them drew them out of selfishness into careers of disinterested beneficence! This fact of the transformation of moral evil into moral benefit, through some remedial spiritual process of counter-irritancy, may not, metaphysically speaking, give us a satisfactory reason for the existence of the evil. But, practically, it is certainly cause for congratulation, if evil must exist, that man has learned to turn it to so good account, that, by the very effort to overcome its resistance, he has increased his vigor and capacity for virtue; and it is a strong argument for a divine element in his own nature, as also for a divine plan and purpose in the universe, that he has so learned.

And in human experience we have abundant illustration of the wisdom of the arrangement by which good and evil are allowed to exist together instead of being arbitrarily separated, both in respect to the effect upon the good and the effect

upon the evil. We naturally shrink from sending out the young from the seclusion of well-guarded and virtuous homes into places where they must come into association with those who have not had their moral protection and who have probably learned not a little of the roughness and viciousness of the world. Yet experience does not show that those whose entire educational period has been kept carefully guarded under pure home influences from contact with the possible evil of the world. make the strongest or most virtuous characters. They are quite likely to break down, when the emergencies of life throw them upon their own resources and the great temptations come in their careers. What is needed is that the young should take out from their virtuous homes such a loyalty to moral principle that they can effectively resist the evil influences that may come from any ordinary contact with rough or vicious associates. home that can send out with its young this stanch fidelity to virtue, this inward loyalty to truth, to honesty, to purity, to manliness, not only saves them "unspotted" from the evil of the world, but through them wields a gracious, healthful influence. that can but do something to redeem the manners and the morals of those less fortunately born and educated.

The

So in the single home. It is certainly fortunate, when we consider the whole problem of human advancement, that the virtues do not all appear in one household, the vices in another.

The strong and the weak, the virtuously disposed and the viciously inclined, are born into the same family, and are to be reared together. If only a wisely directing hand hold the helm, this may be no detriment to any, but a great good to all. The different individualities, the opposing and even clashing temperaments, may help to educate each other. The strong may give of their strength to the weak, and yet lose none in the giving. The virtuous disposition may check the vicious into bounds of self-control, and yet train itself to needed patience and charity in the process.

And, even in the marriage relation, it is, on the whole, fortunate for human society that the good are not always mated together and the bad together, but that here, too, the wheat and the tares, if tares there must be, are united; fortunate that love to a certain extent is morally blind, so that even saint and sinner may be drawn together in the marriage bond. There are, indeed, certain grossnesses of sin (more on the part of men than women) which should forever debar from the sacred relation of marriage, because not only the rights of the living, but the rights of the unborn, are involved; and there are certain gross excesses of evil which, on either side, and equally on both sides, may be deemed an adequate ground for breaking the relation when once formed. But, these exceptions aside, Nature knows her aim; and it is a beneficent one, when she makes love overlook faults, and see only merit and beauty, and so draws together char