Now, when man appeared, what happened? The origin, not of evil, but the origin of goodness. A conscience was born. Man came into possession of a moral ideal, in the light of which he recognized something higher than this animalism that was all around him, and became conscious of the fact that he must battle against that, and put it under his feet. So that the life of the world, from that day to this, has been the growth, the gradual increase, and the gradual conquest of good over that which was in existence before. There is no fall of man, then, there is no conscious and purposeful rebellion against God to be accounted for, there is no need of any devil to explain the facts. He is only an encumbrance, only in the way, only makes it difficult and practically impossible to solve our problem. The old story was that, after the rebellion, pain and death and all evil came into the human world; and the natural world was blighted. Thorns and briers and thistles sprang up on every hand; and animals which before had been peaceful began to fight and destroy each other. We all know this to be a childish myth, and pagan. The actual history of the world has been something entirely other than that. Now I do not wish that you should suppose that I minimize evil, that I make light of sin, that I do not properly estimate the cruelties and the wrongs that have devastated the world. I need only suggest to you that you look in this direction and that to see how hideous all these evils may be; how bitter, how cruel, is the fruit of wrong thoughts and of wrong actions. Look at a man, for example, divine in the possibilities of his being, but through vice, through drink, through habits of one kind and another, corrupted until it is an insult to a brute to call him brutal. We do not deny all this. Notice the cruelties of men towards each other, the jealousies, the envies, the strifes, the warfares. How one class looks down upon and treats with contempt another that is a little lower! How masters have used their slaves; how tyrants like Nero and Caligula have made themselves hideous spectacles of what is possible to humanity, on a stage that is world-wide and illuminated by the flash-lights of history!