The way to overcome evil is to love something that is good.
In some way the secret vice exhales its poison; and the evil passion, however cunningly masked, stains through to the surface.
Whatever may be our condition in life, it is better to lay hold of its advantages than to count its evils.
This is the essential evil of vice: it debases a man.
All evil, in fact the very existence of evil, is inexplicable until we refer to the paternity of God. It hangs a huge blot in the universe until the orb of divine love rises behind it. In that apposition we detect its meaning. It appears to us but a finite shadow as it passes across the disk of infinite light.
A man can no more be a Christian without facing evil and conquering it than he can be a soldier without going to battle, facing the cannon's mouth, and encountering the enemy in the field.
In the history of man it has been very generally the case that when evils have grown insufferable they have touched the point of cure.
