Possibly some may think, that it is strange, that God should have permitted mankind to be—subject to such moral and spiritual perils. As to why the world was hade as it is, perhaps we fordly know, except that a world that was not full of perils would have bred a race of moral mollycoddles, and a life that was not a warfare would not have been a life to breed heroes. There must be fighting of some kind if we are to be men. So it may help us to understand this matter, if we are reminded that this alertness, this watchfulness of sin, has its analogue in the world of nature. It is suggestive how much of a piece, the seen and unseen things are. Disease ''cou-cheth at the door." We boast that our age has discovered the germ theory of many of the deadliest of diseases. They are everywhere—in the air, on fabrics, on our hands—waiting til we are in a less vigorous state of health, to enter into us and lay us low. You ride in a public ricsha that has just been used to take a smallpox patient, to the hospital, and the germ of that terror has you. Truly when we read all that the medical authorities have to say about the ubiquity of germs, the wonder is not that so many die, as that anybody is alive at all. And so it is in the moral and spiritual] world. The germs of every kind of crime and sin are al] about us awaiting their chance of entry into our soul.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.