Our forefathers were more fortunate, and could contemplate evil more philosophically and objectively. Their experience was happily limited to what the normal soul could endure. Their evil was confined to their vicinity. What dim intelligence of foreign disaster and misery leaked in, only served to purify and sober their spirits. Evil did not then reverberate around the world as it does now. Their nerves were not strained or made raw by the reiterations and expatiations on far-away pestilence and famine, gigantic sea disasters, wanton murders, or even the shocking living conditions of the great city slums. Their imaginations had opportunity to grow healthily, unassailed by the morbidities of distant evil, which seems magnified and ominous through its very strangeness. They were not forced constantly to ask themselves the question, “What kind of a world do we live in anyhow? Has it no mercy and no hope?” They were not having constantly thrown up to them a justification of the universe. Perhaps it was because they were more concerned with personal sin than with objective evil. The enormity of sin against their Maker blotted out all transient misfortune and death. But it was more likely that the actual ignorance of that evil permitted their personal flagrancies to loom up larger in their sight. Whatever the cause, there was a difference. We have only to compare their literature--solid, complacent, rational--with our restless and hectic stuff; or contrast their portraits--well-nourished, self-respecting faces--with the cheap or callous or hunted faces that we see about us to-day, to get the change in spiritual fibre which this opening of the world has wrought. It has been a real eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A social conscience has been born. An expansion of soul has been forced upon us. We have the double need of a broader vision to assimilate the good that is revealed to us, and a stronger courage to bear the evil with which our slowly-bettering old world still seems to reek.