ng evil,
capable of an ideal but habitually falling below it, no mere automaton,
but possessed of a spiritual will and an accusing conscience--I ask how
else can he be educated, in the true sense of the word, and raised from
death unto life except by being made to educe his own results and work
out his evil premiss to the bitter end, till he is forced to go back
upon himself, and recognize the right principle which he has violated?
The very law of his being, of every being who is being raised from death
unto life, is, that he can only know life through death, only grasp good
by grappling with evil, only gain knowledge by knowing ignorance; his
highest must be sown in weakness before it can be raised in power, must
be sown in dishonor before it can be raised in glory.

Look back over the past and see if it is not in conflict with these
great world evils, themselves the results of man's moral blindness and
sin, that we have worked out the true principles of our life, the higher
possibilities of our humanity.

Take the most elementary case first, man's disobedience to the physical
laws under which he must live to have a sound mind in a sound body. Man
in his primitive stages is emphatically not a clean animal. On the
contrary, he is a very dirty one. He has none of the cat's dainty
neatness and cleanliness, none of her instinctive recognition of the
deodorizing and purifying power of the earth, that makes the foulest
thing once buried spring up in fresh grass and fragrant flowers. He has
nothing of the imperative impulse of the little ant which he treads
under his lordly feet to shampoo his brother, let alone himself. It has
needed the discipline and the suffering of the ages to evolve that great
banner of progress, the clean shirt. From what great world pestilences
has he not had to suffer as the consequences of his own uncleanliness!
Cholera has been rightly called the beneficent sanitary inspector of the
world. With what foul diseases, the very details of which would sicken,
has he not had to be scourged withal to get him to recognize and obey
the one Divine injunction, "Wash and be clean"! Truly his knowledge and
recognition of sanitary law, his "physical righteousness," has had to be
sown in the weakness and corruption of disease before it could be raised
to the power of a recognized law of life, insuring that cleanliness
which is next to godliness.

Again, take the great principle of national freedom,--that a natio