Editorial July 17, 1920 Issue

The One Evil

Frederick Dixon

For centuries much of the world has lived in terror of a curse. Even to-day, amongst uneducated people, quite apart from the dwellers in darkest Africa, the belief in the evil eye, or some such other terror, is far more potent than any belief in the power of good. The evolution of the whole idea may be traced back into the twilight of civilization. Primitive man, fearful of the blackness of the night, found one of his earliest expressions of worship in the moon which came to lighten the material darkness. Gradually, in his struggling realization of Principle, the sun took the place of the moon. Nevertheless the god of darkness in the folklore of the world always struggles for supremacy with the god of light; and though in these folk stories it is the god of light who invariably conquers, yet in practice the worshiper was far more apt to placate the god of darkness, whom he pictured as perpetually lying in wait to destroy him, rather than the god of light, whose hand was always stretched out to assist him.

To teach the world to rely on good as more powerful than evil was the great effort which came into existence with monotheism, for so long as there were many gods, it was impossible to induce the worshiper not to believe in the power of these gods, whom he invested with all his own mortal passions, to hurt rather than to help. Even the monotheist, allegorically fell back on the tree of good and of evil, and though he acknowledged only one God, Jhvh, whom he invested with all power, nevertheless he personified evil under the name of serpent, or Beelzebub, or a dozen other aliases, and so revivified the ancient story of the struggle of Merodach with Tiamat in the struggle of Bel and the dragon, or else rehearsed the contest of Marsyas with Apollo, in the story of the effort of Satan to tempt the human race.

All through the Old Testament there is traced this struggle of sensuality against spiritually, as portrayed in the efforts of the schools of the prophets to maintain a pure monotheism, in the face of the materialistic efforts of the priests of Baal, or Dagon, or of a hundred other deities, to intrench their worship with all the sensual appeals which could be addressed to the human mind. The Old Testament is the record of the gradual dawning of a better sense of good throughout the world, and this sense of good is always manifest in a willingness to accept good as the one omnipotent power, and evil as the travesty of that power. Thus Moses attempted, with the help of the law, to subdue and control the animal passions of the Israelites; thus Elijah strove to show, albeit by the most material means, that there was no power outside the dominion of Jhvh, especially on that wonderful day when he mocked the priests of Baal through the long hours when the sun was burning down on Carmel, until, at the moment of the evening sacrifice, he caused the fire to light upon his own sacrifice, and so brought about the slaughter of the priests of the disgraced deity; and so Isaiah appealed from the material sacrifice of goats and rams to the sacrifice of men's own passions, in the struggle to turn from evil to good.

Send a comment to the editors

We'd love to hear from you!

Easily submit your testimonies, articles, and poems online.

Submit

The One Evil

We'd love to hear from you!

Sign up for unlimited access