What is evil?
Well, we leave God to decide what it is, but also we have no reason that
I can see for limiting the impressive width of the word. It is a
profound insight into the nature of evil which, in our own language and
in other tongues, uses one word to express both what we call sin, and
what we call sorrow. And I know not why we should suppose that our Lord
does not include both of these here. There is what we call physical
evil, pain, sorrow, meaning thereby whatever wars against our well-being
and happiness. There is what we call moral evil, sin, meaning thereby
whatever wars against our purity. Both are evil. Men's consciences tell
them so of the one. Men's sensibilities tell them so of the other.
You cannot sophisticate a man into believing that he is not suffering
when his flesh is racked or his heart wounded. It is evil to be in pain.
It is evil to carry a heavy heart. It is evil to be stripped of what we
have long been accustomed to lean upon. It is evil to be crushed down by
loss and want. It is evil to stand by the black hole that swallows the
coffin that holds the light of our eyes. It is evil to have the arrows
of calumny or hate sticking in our quivering spirits. It is evil to be
battered with the shocks of change and doom in the world, to have to
toil at ungrateful tasks beyond our strength. The life which turns the
child's rounded features into the thin face lined and wrinkled, and the
child's elastic run into the slow, heavy tread, is after all a life
which in its outward aspects is a life of evil.
And many a man who has had little sympathy with what seem to him the
hazy platitudes of the rest of the prayer, learns to pray this clause,
and is always ready to pray it. For we may be sure of this, that they
who make the world their all are they who feel its evils most keenly.
From how many lips unused to prayer are cries every hour going up in
this sorrowful world which really mean, 'deliver us from evil'!
But it is not only these external evils which the prayer includes. It
means every kind of sin, all dominion of what is contrary to God's will.
And the petition is 'deliver,' pull us out, drag us from. It is a cry
for the _entire_ emancipation or _utter_ extinction of evil in its
effect upon us.
So this petition in its clear recognition of evil sets forth man's
condition distinctly, and is opposed to that false stoicism which tries
to argue men out of their senses, and convince them that the fire which
burns them is only a painted fire. Christianity has nothing in common
with that insensibility to suffering which it is sometimes supposed to
teach. Christ wept, and bade the daughters of Jerusalem weep also.
Christianity has deep words to say about evil and pain as being salutary
and for our good, and about submission to God's will as being better
than wild wishes to be delivered now and at once from all pain and
sorrow. But it begins with full admission that evil is evil, and all its
teachings presuppose that. Job was tormented by the well-meaning
platitudes of his friends, who lifted up their hands in holy horror that
he did not lie on his dunghill, as if it had been a bed of roses; and
Job, who felt all the sorrow of his losses and ground out many a wrong
saying between his teeth, was justified because he had held by the truth
that his senses taught him, that pain was bitter and bad, and by the
other which his faith taught him, that God must be good. He could not
reconcile them. We can in part; but our Lord has taught us in this
prayer that it is not to be done by denying or sophisticating facts.
Then let us use this prayer in all its breadth, and feel that it covers
all which makes our hearts heavy, and all which makes our consciences
sore.
'From all evil and mischief--plague, pestilence, and famine, as well as
envy, hatred, and hypocrisy--from sin, from the crafts and assaults of
the devil,--Good Lord, deliver us.' 'In all time of our tribulation; in
all time of our wealth, in the hour of death, and in the day of
judgment,--Good Lord, deliver us.'