Edmund Burke, 18th century Scottish philosopher and politician, famously said: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

Those words have recently been quoted again in the context of a young American girl, so taunted and bullied by fellow students, that she was driven to suicide. (www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=371163&src=)

Sometimes it is so easy to turn a blind eye to evil until it is too late. Our motives are often too mixed.

Our desire should be always to see all things, persons and events in the light of Almighty God . . . to see them as God himself sees them.

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Read Saint Mark’s gospel, chapter 14: Jesus is praying in the garden the night before his crucifixion.

Picture it in your mind as you read.

Never again will you doubt that those words were written by an eyewitness, actually present when it happened.

But none of us can appreciate fully what Our Lord went through that night.

He was pure goodness — for us, evil lives at the very starting-place of our every thought and action.

If you or I were the only person ever to have lived, Christ’s suffering would have been necessary to redeem us from our sin.

No other man ever understood the world’s evil as Jesus, God-incarnate, did.

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That is what salvation means — seeing the world as Christ sees it — seeing, as he did, the horribleness of evil and sin.

Once we see that, we’ll be able to take that first and most vital step in fighting against the evil in the world – getting rid of the sin in our own lives.

God will give the necessary strength.