and the dead are welcomed back from the graves, when the final test by Satan comes, and when, with all aches and pains gone, it will be possible to stand before Jehovah in human perfection along with a great crowd of others, to receive from His hand the prize—justification to life!

Now, why don’t you become a pioneer?

Evil—Does It Soften or Does It Harden You?

“BANG! Bang! Bang!” Three shots in the back and the fleeing father lay dead on the ground, murdered by his seventeen-year-old son. For several years this son had argued with his father and now had chosen this way to end these arguments once and for all. The evidence at the trial showed that the murder was “clearly premeditated.” During the cross-examination he declared, “If I had to do it over again, I would.” As the judge sentenced him, a mere five to twelve years for premeditated patricide, the youth “remained stony-faced.”—New York Times, November 16, 1960.

This teen-ager had permitted evil to harden him. His father’s treatment of him, whether just or unjust, appeared as an evil to him and he had let it harden him to the extent of premeditated murder. Repeatedly one reads of such murders, showing that this is an age of hardheartedness.

Evil, as already intimated, may be just or unjust. It is anything that causes pain, sorrow or distress. World Wars I and II were evils, unjust ones, caused by man. The flood of Noah’s day was an evil, a just one, sent by God. Yes, God at times creates not only good but also calamity or evil.—Isa. 45:7.

SOME BECOME HARD, SOME BECOME SOFT

We need not let evil harden us. It is all up to us. We can let it soften us, if we want to. Who knows how many other youths disagree and have arguments with their fathers without murdering them? How true this is can be seen as we examine that epic of human history, the Bible.

Adam may be said to have been the first one who let evil harden him. When faced with God’s judgment of him, an evil, he hardheartedly blamed God and his wife. “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree and so I ate it.” How hard he had let his heart become in just a short period of time!—Gen. 3:12.

The ten plagues that God caused to come upon Egypt, to show Pharaoh who Jehovah is, were evils. No question about