A Word from the Gulag

One of my post-grad required readings in an Inter-Disciplinary course was Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. That was a distant summer ago. As my last post on 9-11, I thought a quote from The Gulag is appropriate:

The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil. It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.

The Biblical world view of this conclusion is:

By sin, man fell from their original righteousness and communion with God (Genesis 3:6-8; Ecclesiastes 7:29; Romans 3:23), and so became dead in sin, (Genesis 2:17; Ephesians 2:1), and wholly defiled in all the parts and faculties of soul and body (Titus 1:15; Genesis 6:5; Jeremiah 17:9; Romans 3:10-18).