The singular number suggests that all evil, multiform as it seems, is at
bottom one. It is a great weltering coil, but wilderness and tangle as
it appears, there is a tap root from which it all comes, like a
close-clinging mass of ivy which is choking the life out of an elm-tree.
If that root were grubbed up, all would fall. It is like some huge sea
monster 'floating many a rood,' but there is only one life in it. The
hydra has a hundred heads, but one heart. And the place in the prayer in
which this clause comes suggests what that is--sin.
That place implies that all human sorrows and sufferings are
consequences of human evil. And that is true inasmuch as many of them
are distinctly and naturally its results. Disease is often the result of
dissipation, poverty of indolence, friendlessness of selfishness. How
many of the miseries of our great cities, how many of the miseries of
nations, result from criminal neglect and injustice! 'Man's inhumanity
to man makes countless thousands mourn.' Ah! if all men were saying from
the heart, 'Thy will be done,' how many of their griefs would be at an
end! And it is true that sorrows are the consequences of sin inasmuch as
suffering has been introduced by God into the world because of sin. He
has been forced by our rebellion to use judgments, and that to bring us
back.
And it is true that sorrows are the consequences of sin inasmuch as the
sting is taken out of them when our sins are forgiven and we love God.
Then they so change their characters as scarcely to deserve to be called
by their old name, and the paradox, 'sorrowful yet always rejoicing,'
becomes a sober fact of experience.