' For the sake of this, that we may come to
choose the good, all the discipline of the world exists. God is teaching
us to know good and evil in some real degree _as they are_, and not as
_they seem to the incomplete_; so shall we learn to choose the good and
refuse the evil. He would make his children see the two things, good and
evil, in some measure as they are, and then say whether they will be good
children or not. If they fail, and choose the evil, he will take yet
harder measures with them. If at last it should prove possible for a
created being to see good and evil as they are, and choose the evil, then,
and only then, there would, I presume, be nothing left for God but to set
his foot upon him and crush him, as we crush a noxious insect. But God is
deeper in us than our own life; yea, God's life is the very centre and
creative cause of that life which we call _ours_; therefore is the Life in
us stronger than the Death, in as much as the creating Good is stronger
than the created Evil.
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