This prayer implies that all evil is contrary to His will. The one kind is so, absolutely and always. The other is a method to which He has had recourse, but not that which, if things had gone right, He would have adopted.
So this prayer breathes confidence that God will overcome both kinds.
How much there is to make us believe that evil is eternal.
How apt we are to fall into despair, to lose heart for ourselves and our fellows; to say that it has always been so, and it always will be so.
For all social reformers here is encouragement.
For ourselves, when we seem to do so little in setting ourselves right, here is confidence.
But it must be God who conquers the world's evil. Our most potent weapon in the struggle with our own and the world's evil is the earnest offering of this petition.
Think of the failure of godless schemes; how often we have been on the verge of political and other millenniums.
Only the God, who cures sin, can cure the world's ills.
We are not to substitute praying for working. God may answer our prayer by setting us to work.
Remember that you pledge yourselves to work for your fellows by that us, and to try to reduce, were it by ever so little, the sum of human misery.
