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THE POSSIBILITY OF EVIL,

self-love. Take next the evil of Revenge. The passion of revenge is simply wounded Self-love rising up in anger against one who has done, or is supposed to have done it an injury, and bursting out in fury against its enemy, burning to trample him under its feet, and sometimes even thirsting for his heart's blood. All anger, indeed, in any of its forms, is simply heated self-love rising up either in excited self-defence against whatever. offers an appearance of assault, or against whatever even innocent object may happen to stand in the way of accomplishing its wishes and designs. Thus, a tyrant burns with anger and fury against whomsoever he happens to hear of as offering any opposition to his ambitious purposes, or even breathing a wish for liberty. Behold Nebuchadnezzar casting into the fiery furnace, seven-times heated, the three innocent men, simply because they would not obey his will, and fall down before the image he had set up. Self-love is the whole root and source of this love of dominion,—one of the two great master evils that afflict humanity, and bring upon the world half it's miseries. The other of these two, namely, the excessive love of money, of property, which rules at the present day so great a part of mankind—springs from the same single root, self-love. Whether it take the form of avarice and meanness, or of fraud and knavery, or downright theft and robbery, it is but the same single principle in various garbs—Selfishness, and consequent indifference to the comfort and welfare of others, even to taking from them their last farthing, and leaving them to starve and die. Consider, next, murder and war. What are these but the effects of self-love in an aggravated form? Murder, if it be the work of rage