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I. EVERY FACULTY HAS IN ITSELF A CONSTITUTIONAL REPUGNANCE TO THAT WHICH TO IT IS EVIL.

1. It is a part of its health that it should have this power of rebound. The lowest forms of this feeling are simply those of dislike, then repugnance, then hatred, and then abhorrence. The very word, in its etymology, signifies that kind of affright which causes the quill or the hair of an animal to stand on end, and throws it into a violent tremor, and puts it into the attitude either of self-defence or aggression, so that every part of it is stirred up with a consuming feeling.

2. Is it not a dangerous weapon to put into a man's hands? It is a very dangerous weapon. So is fire. We must therefore use it, and use it discreetly.

3. You must learn to be good haters — but not of men. Ah! there are hundreds of men that know how to hate men, where there is one that knows how to love a man and hate evil. True, evil may in extreme cases become so wrought into individual persons that we scarcely can distinguish the one from the other; but ordinarily it is not so.

4. We are to hate all crimes against society. Whether these be within the express letter of the law or not, whether they be disreputable in the greater measure or in the less is quite immaterial. We are also to hate all qualities and actions which corrupt the individual; which injure manhood in man; all that creates sorrow or suffering, or tends to do it.

II. THE WANT OF THIS MORAL REBOUND WILL BE FOUND TO BE RUINOUS. It destroys the individual to whom it is lacking, and it is mischievous to the community in which it is lacking.

1. Hatred of evil is employed by God as one of those penalties by which evil is made to suffer in such a way that it is intimidated and restrained. It makes evil hazardous. In a community where men can do as they please, wickedness is bolder. Selfishness is hateful; and if men express their hatred of it, selfish men are afraid to be as selfish as they want to be. Corrupt passions — the lava of the soul, which overflows with desolating power at times in communities — are greatly restrained by intimidations, by the threat of men's faces, and by the thunder of men's souls.

2. Abhorrence is indispensable to the purity of a man's own self who is in the midst of a "perverse and crooked generation." Now, the expressions of this feeling are by reaction the modes in which moral sense, the repugnance to evil is strengthened. And if you, for any reason, forbear to give expression to the feeling, it goes out like fire that is smothered. A man is not worthy of the name of man who has no power of indignation. I have heard it said of men that they died and had not an enemy. Well, they ought to have died a great while before! For a true man, a man that knows how to rebuke wickedness, finds enough of it to do in this world. Has a man lived forty or fifty or sixty years and never rebuked wicked man enough to make that man hate him, so that you can put on his tomb, "He has not left an enemy"? Why, I could put that on a cabbage field.

III. THE LACK OF THIS ABHORRENCE IS PITIABLY SEEN —

1. In the pulpit. What are pulpits good for that go piping music over the heads of men who are guilty of gigantic transgressions? It is sad to see pulpits that dare not call things by their right names. A man had better be a John, and go into the wilderness clothed in camel's hair, and eating locusts and wild honey, than to be a fat minister in a fat pulpit, supporting himself luxuriously by betraying God and playing into the hands of the devil.

2. In public sentiment itself. It refuses to take high moral ground, and to be just and earnest. To a certain extent the evil is less in newspapers, yet it is seen very glaringly there also. We are not deficient in newspapers, which, when they are angry, avenge their prejudices and passions with great violence. But to be calm, to be just, and then without fear or favour, discriminatingly but intensely to mark and brand iniquity, and to defend righteousness — this is to make a newspaper a sublime power over the community. Alas! that there should be so few such newspapers. I think it high time that we should speak more frequently on this subject. The want of indignation at flagrant wickedness is one of the alarming symptoms of our times.

(H. W. Beecher.)

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KJV: Let love be without dissimulation. Abhor that which is evil; cleave to that which is good.

WEB: Let love be without hypocrisy. Abhor that which is evil. Cling to that which is good.