_all_ evil speaking which are
put away: This leaves no room for what the world calls "just wrath"
"righteous anger," or speaking evil of evil doers. Let us call to mind
the incident in the early life of St. John, afterwards the great
disciple of love, when he wanted to call down wrath on the wicked
inhabitants of a city and was rebuked by Our Lord who said, "Ye know not
in what spirit ye speak." After love had supplanted wrath, and the good
spirit had taken the place of the evil in St. John's heart, he was sent
to convert the people he would have destroyed. Yes, it is the spirit
that matters, the wrath that is wrong and that must be put away before
we can love God or our neighbour as ourself, for the fruit of the Spirit
is love, joy, peace, long suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith,
meekness, temperance.

When we understand that the object of life and of education is the
creation of a spirit and not the doing of things, we are freed from the
tyranny of results in this world as a final test and come to realize
that judgment belongs only to God Who as a Spirit judges the effort.

Of course this does not mean that we are freed from the moral law, that
certain evil things in ourselves and in others are not always the
results of an evil spirit, but rather that in addition to avoiding and
shunning those things which are obviously evil, we must with equal care
avoid doing even good things in a bad spirit. The commandments still
stand, the moral law is abated not one jot, but in Christianity and in
Christianity alone are we given power to fulfill the law and to add the
new commandment, the summing up of them all, of love to God and man. No
human soul comes into the world without some desire to be good, because
each human soul is a child of God. To each one, not blinded by pride
(and surely it should be easy in these days to be humble) comes, sooner
or later, the realization of his own inability of himself to do what he
would, the need for a power outside himself, the power which is
available and of which we have heard "I am come that ye might have life
and more abundantly." Let us examine how the apostles set about living
this abundant life. In Dr. Genung's "The Life Indeed" we read, "One and
all they made it a matter of the spirit that is the man, but the spirit
they recognized was not an abstraction, or a theory, but a present
Person and helper who was witnessing with their spirits. St. John makes
the matter equally defin