What should be the attitude of the soul in view of the hindrances by which it is environed?  It should be taught to fight them at every point.  Nowhere is the kindness of nature more evident than in the patience and persistence with which this instruction is conveyed.

Nature withholds her favors until they are earned.  New light comes only to those who have used-the light they had.  Strength is developed by resistance.  Growth is for those who place themselves where growth is possible.  Nature gives the soul nothing, but she always waits to cooeperate with it.  This lesson was impressed long ago.  It ought never to require new emphasis.  Let the younger study the experiences of their elders.  They will be saved many failures and much pain.  The soul can never be coerced, but it may be taught.  Milton has enforced this great lesson in Comus: 

          “Against the threats
    Of malice or of sorcery, of that power
    Which erring men call Chance, this I hold firm—­
    Virtue may be assailed, but never hurt,
    Surprised by unjust force, but not enthralled;
    Yet, even that which mischief meant most harm,
    Shall in the happy trial prove most glory;
    But evil on itself shall back recoil,
    And mix no more with goodness, when at last
    Gathered like a scum, and settled to itself,
    It shall be in eternal restless change
    Self-fed, and self-consumed; if this fail
    The pillar’d firmament is rottenness
    And earth’s base built on stubble.”

No one should believe, after all the growth of the ages, that the soul was made to be imprisoned in a fleshly prison.  It was intended that it should burst its barriers and press toward the light.  There is an eternal enmity between the serpent and the soul, and the serpent’s head must be bruised, but the soul resisting all the forces and fascinations of the flesh, rising on that which has been cast down to higher things, slowly but surely, painfully but with ever added strength moves toward the ideal humanity which has never been better defined than as “the fullness of Christ.”

Meanwhile it is well to reinforce our faith by remembering that it is written in the nature of things that truth and goodness must prevail.

This is a moral universe.  Error never can be victorious.  It may be exalted for a time, but that will be only in order that it may be sunk to deeper depths.  Evil and error are doomed and always have been.  Evil is moral disease, and disease always tends toward death, while life always and of necessity presses toward larger, more beautiful, and more beneficent being.

Here let us rest.  Many things are dark and impossible of explanation, but we have already been taught a few lessons of superlative importance.  We have learned that the soul is made for the light; that it can be satisfied only with love and truth; that every hindrance may be overcome; that the animal was made to be the servant of the spirit; that the body makes a good servant but a poor master; that strength comes to those who refuse to submit to the clamors of appetite:  thus we have been led to see something of the way along which the soul has moved from animalism toward freedom and victory.