Evil influence

“ And the oldest explanation in the world to account for the evil potentiality of incidents otherwise slight and trifling occurred to him—that by virtue of supernal powers, and through the agency of vicious persons, petty things were sometimes charged with an influence that compelled one to an evil destiny. ”

“ If people would listen to the whisperings of that Spirit, they would be led into the paths, of truth and righteousness. If they would overcome temptations to evil—cause their spirits to overcome the flesh, they would bring themselves into subjection to the law of Christ and become Saints of God.
You design evils in your neighbourhoods, in your families, and in yourselves. The disposition to produce evil, to annoy, to disturb the peace of families, neighbours, and society, is produced by the power of the enemy over the flesh, through the fall. ”

“ Evil influences surround them from their birth. These beautiful creatures have in them the possibilities of becoming mean, base, corrupt, treacherous, deceitful, cruel, false, revengeful; of becoming, in fact, unworthy and repulsive in many ways. ”

“ It is cause and effect. Evil exists on every hand; the well disposed, philanthropic, and generous, and the good seek relief from these evil influences by moral suasion, by self-denial, by religion, by politics, etc. ”

“ For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornication, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness: all these evil things come from within, and defile the man."—Verses 20-23. ”

“ No form of vice, not worldliness, not greed of gold, not drunkenness itself, does more to un-Christianize society than evil temper. For embittering life, for breaking up communities, for destroying the most sacred relationships, for devastating homes, for withering up men and women, for taking the bloom of childhood, in short,
For sheer gratuitous misery-producing power
this influence stands alone. ”

“ If evil is supreme here, shall it not be so in that undiscovered country,—that life to come? The dreams that may come give him pause, and he either shuffles on, doubting, hesitating, and incapable of decision, or he hurls himself wildly against his fate. ”

“ THUS far we have dealt with that class of the general expulsion of evils which I have called direct or immediate. In this class the evils are invisible, at least to common eyes, and the mode of deliverance consists for the most part in beating the empty air and raising such a hubbub as may scare the mischievous spirits and put them to flight. It remains to illustrate the second class of expulsions, in which the evil influences are embodied in a visible form or are at least supposed to be loaded upon a material medium, which acts as a vehicle to draw them off from the people, village, or town. ”

“ To reason, justify, to apotheosize evil, to establish its ritual, to show the excellence of it—is this not worse than to commit it? To adore the demon, or love evil, the abstract or the concrete term of one and the same fact. ”

“ Or if these are evils, must we not give the name of good things to bodily strength, sight, hearing, persuasive speech, fertility, native land, liberty, life, all which you hold to exist in that kingdom of evil, and yet venture to call it the perfection of evil? ”

“ The sorts of evil which these monsters so uncouthly represent are such as physical suffering, drunkenness, violence, fraud, and the thousand shapes of slavery, personal and political, and of all castes and colors. ”

“ Every husband, every father, every brother, feared and loathed him as the incarnation of the Evil one—in their mean, narrow, tedious nauseating philosophy they held him as a perjured villain of the deepest dye, steeped in utterest infamy! ”

“ This subtle adaptation of the symbol of external pain to the representation of the moral struggle, wherein the hostile power may assume deceptive forms of beauty and pleasure, is only one impressive illustration of the transfer of human conceptions of evil from outward to inward [6] nature. ”

“ In former days it was—"love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance." What is the fruit of the spirit of evil? Envy, malice, hatred, evil-speaking, lying and slandering one another and towards other people. ”

“ Owing the sustaining of their existence for the greater part to rapine and violence, yet holding an important place in the great design of the physical universe, they appear to personate a principle, if we may be allowed to use the expression, involving one of the most momentous and mysterious of problems, the existence of evil in the world. ”

“ Bloodshed is the trade, and horror is the element of this man. The process by which the sympathies of nature are extinguished in our hearts, by which evil is made our good, and by which we are made susceptible of no activity but in the infliction, and no joy but in the spectacle of woes, is an obvious process. As to an alliance with evil geniuses, the power and the malice of daemons have been a thousand times exemplified in human beings. There are no devils but those which are begotten upon selfishness, and reared by cunning. ”

“ We do not realize the insidious working of evil in [Pg 302] ourselves; but when it is revealed to us objectively, when it is thrown into relief by an outbreak of evil deeds in others, our healthy instinctive impulse is to crush it. Surely back of the religious and the legal persecutions has been the desire to exterminate apparent evil; that desire is still with us but we are learning better methods of handling it than to unleash the bloodhounds of cruelty. ”

“ Are we responsible for what we cannot help? I could not condemn any one but myself. The existence of evil is true, but how horrible! And how it spoils our lives.”
“Spoils our lives,” he repeated. “You are quite right! Tell me, can a man or a woman love two people at once? Is it possible to love evil and good?” ”

“ How could there be an evil act which did not proceed from an antecedent evil principle or disposition? What becomes of the great common notion of mankind, on which his demonstration is erected? But we must allow the author to contradict himself, since he has now come around to the truth, that an evil act of the creature may and must have preceded the existence of moral evil in the world. ”

“ Here is another sort of evil men described to us, that we may neither do like them, nor have any thing to do with them. 1. Such as (like Satan) do all the mischief they can by force and violence, as roaring lions, and not only by fraud and insinuation, as subtle serpents: They are violent men, that do all by rapine and oppression, that shut their eyes, meditating with the closest intention and application of mind to devise froward things, to contrive how they may do the greatest mischief to their neighbour, to do it effectually and yet securely to themselves ”

“ The Occasional Expulsion of Evils WE can therefore understand why those general clearances of evil, to which from time to time the savage resorts, should commonly take the form of a forcible expulsion of devils. In these evil spirits primitive man sees the cause of many if not of most of his troubles, and he fancies that if he can only deliver himself from them, things will go better with him. ”

“ Passing from their public to their private characters we find them stained with every cruel and abominable vice, crime, and wickedness of which humanity at its very worst is capable; their lives are, as it were, the epitome of all the evil of the world ”

“ They could pass swiftly through the air from one part of the world to another, and had the power of influencing the minds of human beings to do their wicked will.
They were of gigantic stature and had coarse, scowling countenances which showed plainly their hatred of all mankind. They possessed no consciences whatever and delighted only in evil deeds. ”

“ And by knowing the evil leaven, and its divers evil effects in ourselves, how it had wrought, and what it had done, we came to have a sense and knowledge of the states of others: and what we could not, nay, we dare not let live and continue in ourselves, as being manifested to us to proceed from an evil principle in the time of man's degeneracy, we could not comply with in others. ”

“ From the highest to the lowest, there is no health or moral soundness. From the crown of the head to the soles of the feet, there is nothing but wounds, and bruises, and putrefying sores. The laws, and their violation, and the punishments everywhere invented for the suppression of vice, prove the universality of the evil. ”

“ And so, to consider that an evil which I consider an evil, although my adversary may consider it good, is no answer. There can be but two answers: either we have to find a true and indisputable criterion of what an evil is, or we must not resist evil with violence. ”

“ Is it possible, do you think, for it to exist, and in the virulent condition we find it, and not poison the blood of our whole community? Moral and spiritual laws are as unvarying in their action, out of natural sight though they be, as physical laws. Evil and good are as positive entities as fire, and destroy or consume as surely. ”

“ When, oppressed by painful recollection, I revolve all these scattered ideas in my mind, when I contemplate my situation, and the thousand streams of evil with which I am surrounded; when I descend into the particular tendency even of the remedy I have proposed, I am convulsed— convulsed sometimes to that degree, as to be tempted to exclaim—Why has the master of the world permitted so much indiscriminate evil throughout every part of this poor planet, at all times, and among all kinds of people? ”

“ And, without presuming to scan too deeply the intentions of Providence, or the great system by which evil is brought out of good, and an irresistible power says to the madness of the people, as to the storms of the ocean, "Hitherto shalt thou come, and no farther, and here shall thy proud waves be staid," we may probably discover, humanly speaking, the means by which the evil has been arrested. ”

“ When, forsooth, has the manifest existence of evil in any form, of intellectual or moral error, of political anarchy, of religious heresy, or even of natural violence, not shaken man's conceits about what is and what is right? The very conceits—and this the more as they are definite and assertive—help to make the manifest evil, very much as a definite law has its part in making a particular crime, and the evil so arising, as it is distinctly manifested, cannot fail to assail and unsettle the conceits. ”

“ Yet, perhaps, if we could trace them back to their origin in the mind of primitive man, we might find that they all resolve themselves more or less exactly into the principle of the transference of evil. ”

“ The root of the evil lies deeper, and it is that which has to be attacked. Make the general aspect of life more attractive, and there will then be less desire to smirch it with crude blotches of colour. ”

“ His crimes, however, rather than his virtues, have illustrated and distinguished him with an unhappy pre-eminence above all other created things. His heart is evil, and, left to its uncontrolled impulses, he becomes licentious, merciless and more cruel than the fiercest beasts of prey. ”

“ Besides this aerial spirit they believe in an inferior one, who inhabits the fire, and of whom they are in perpetual dread, as, though he possesses equally the power of good and evil, the evil is apt to predominate. ”

“ What villanies of every kind are committed day by day; yea, too often with impunity, by those who sin with a high hand, and glory in their shame? Who can reckon up the oaths, curses, profaneness, blasphemies, the lying, slandering, evil-speaking, the sabbath-breaking, gluttony, drunkenness, revenge, the whoredoms, adulteries, and various uncleanness, the frauds, injustice, oppression, extortion, which overspread our land as a flood? ”

“ Vice and depravity, on the contrary, separate souls from the primitive source of light, and chain them to the abode of the elements: they become evil spirits. The imperfectly good migrate from one body to another, until, by the efficacy of good words and actions, they are finally emancipated from matter, and gain a higher rank. ”

“ We are told that the numerous charms hung about them are to ward off the “evil eye”—rather a necessary precaution, when we see the little innocents in close contact with vice in its most rampant form, or such a scene as that before us. ”

“ Could we but have the heart of the wicked laid open before us; could we but see how it is torn and wrung by the evil passions that harbour within it; could we but mark how, even in the strongest and most determined breast, when bent upon evil purposes, or engaged in wicked acts, fear and apprehension go hand in hand with every deed of evil, while repentance, remorse, and punishment follow more slowly, though not less surely, in the distance ”

“ Certain it is, that in the time of our Lord, the evil spirits had some extraordinary power over the bodies of some men; entering into them as it were, and making them do things hurtful to themselves and others. ”

“ That very intellect which should have shed a halo over the pure things of earth is here devoted to the production of things evil.
A tendency to sap the foundation upon which rest the pillars of morality, and to poison the minds of youth, seems to be a prevailing vice. High literary attainments, great mental powers, have been brought into the arena to battle for crime, lasciviousness, and vice. In all ages the vile corruption of man’s nature, aided by genius and talent, has been manifested in the production of things evil. ”

“ If the good which men have and feel, penetrates into their speech, and leaves its deposit there, so does also the evil. Thus we may trace a constant tendency—in too many cases it has been a successful one—to empty words employed in the condemnation of evil, of the depth and earnestness of the moral reprobation which they once conveyed. ”

“ But no possible good, but incalculable evil may and does arise from the too common practice of placing all conduct, the source of which we do not fully understand, to the worst of intentions. How often is the gentle, timid soul discouraged, and driven perhaps to despondency, by finding its 'good evil spoken of;' and a well-meant but mistaken action loaded with an evil design! ”