THE GOOD DEVILS 



— food, an appetite, power of assimilation in the 

 jrganism? Disease is an evil to the living body it 

 attacks, but it does not attack a dead body and it 

 often educates the body to resist disease. It is a 

 war which may leave the victor more capable than 

 he was before. 



Robert Ingersoll conceived of an improvement 

 in creation — "make health contagious instead of 

 disease." But this is to trifle with words. In a cer- 

 tain sense health is contagious. But physical health, 

 like peace of mind, is a condition, and must come 

 from harmony within, while a contagious disease is 

 conveyed by a living micro-organism, and is truly 

 catching, and to change or reverse all this would be 

 to destroy the conditions of life itself. To postulate 

 a world in which two and two would make five, or in 

 which a straight line is not the shortest distance be- 

 tween two points, is to take the road to the insane 

 asylum. Evil is positive only in the sense that 

 shadow or darkness is positive, or that cold is 

 positive. It is a greater or lesser degree of negation. 



In society and in the state we seek to curb or to 

 correct or to eliminate Nature's errors, and in doing 

 so often fall into other errors and cross-purposes. 

 Yet to fight what we call evil, and promote what we 

 call good, is the supreme duty of all men. Physical 

 evil the doctors and natural philosophers warn us 

 against; moral evil, which is a much more intangible 

 thing, our ethical teachers point out to us; mental 



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