“I form the light and create darkness; I make peace and create evil; I the Lord do all these things.” It may be remarked that the proclamation of the divine herald here cited is not fully acknowledged up to this day, even in the churches that profess his theology. But, seeing that it took a dozen centuries to set aside the idea of a dual divinity, it is not surprising that twenty-five centuries have passed without an absolute clearing of squat claims to universal dominion—for idolatry is of rapid growth, but it decays exceeding slowly, and so reverses the general law of primitive nature. So it happens that the Walking Delegate of the Garden, who organized the original lock-out, is in chancery for all time defending a pretender’s claim. There is a _caveat_ on the process of disintegration, which is part of creation, antedating his. Near a thousand years before Isaiah proclaimed the divine origin of evil the Levite priests almost discovered the great principle when they set forth the marks and tints whereby the leper’s brand of death might be known. They blindly testified to a marvelous fact that, once fully recognized, ends the theory that death is a penalty. They found the leper’s ominous ulcers uniform and complex. They almost knew that the complexity of destruction is as ingenious as the complexity of life, and the product of as high a creative power. A sad day it was for the authority of our alienated friend, the Walking Delegate, when the seeds of disease were found and science proclaimed, twenty-five centuries after Isaiah, that the Lord of All created the parasite, which has life, as he created the life the destroyer feeds on. In the economy of Providence great changes come mostly from unexpected sources. They were not Parsees or Levites who sought the bacteria of disease. They had no direct quarrel with the Father of Lies, but they doomed Satan when they found in their sterilized culture tubes the sign manual of the Creator of Evil. The germ theory, there established, sealed the fate of catastrophe. Henceforth Satan was an intruder. It was not sin that brought death into the world. Death was in the world before sin. The tree of life itself, in the midst of the Garden, was “for the healing of the nations.” The fruit the man and woman were free to eat yielded its life to their hunger; and hunger itself implied disintegration and death. Not the Walking Delegate who failed to create a lock-out in heaven, but the Creative Intelligence that shaped all things and set life in motion everywhere, is the author of the check that keeps all in balance. He makes peace and creates evil. Our old friend Satan is an interloper and a fraud. Some day, perhaps, we shall rattle his armor and find no living thing therein—like the terrifying empty casque and breastplates that did duty for a ghost in miser Gaspard’s window. WILLIAM MCINTOSH. LINES.