The old asceticism,--the spiritual stupidity of primitive times,--placed the world, the flesh, and the devil on a level of equality, whereas both the world and the flesh are capable of noble uses, but the devil is not. The world and the flesh are servants, and good servants; they are necessary instruments for the carrying out of the Divine purpose in human life. But the devil is merely the perversion of good things to useless, trivial, and degrading ends. He has no power in himself except as we give him power, and we give him power every day when we associate the idea of the world with that of the villains in it, and when we debase the flesh by not realizing the clean, good service for which it is intended. Indeed, we are really feeding the devil in so far as our standards of life are negative, and not positive,--in so far as we are only busy in protecting ourselves from worse sin or from worse disease, instead of casting out _all sin and disease_ as fast as we perceive them in ourselves, and working toward the highest possible standard of wholesome life for body and soul. To "_look to the Lord and shun evils as sins_," means to hold to the standard of health given us by the Lord for both body and soul, so that it may become more and more clear as we apply it to life with persistent strength. Our present standards of life are warped. The abnormal has become so familiar to us as to seem normal. The joy and life-giving power of fresh air for soul and body is too little known to us. A thoroughly healthy world, with wholesome habits of mind and body, is almost out of our ken. The lower standards have become too generally a matter of course,--that is why we do not think of brave and wholesome manhood when we use the expression "a man of the world." It is a certain fact that no man can understand and live in what is good and wholesome, _of his own free will_, without having had temptations,--and strong ones,--to what is evil and unwholesome. Thus a knowledge of the evil in the world enlarges a man's experience just in so far as he uses that knowledge to lead him to the opposite good. A knowledge of evil warps a man's character,--however broad his experience may be,--just in so far as he yields to the evil and allows it to become a part of himself. "And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free." The truth which makes us free is the truth about ourselves, the truth about evil, the truth about everything, and our freedom is full and expansive in proportion as we recognize, acknowledge, and live by the truth, both in general and in detail. II "I am a man and nothing human do I consider alien to me," said Terence two thousand years ago.