using the mechanism of evil so as to tempt, or take advantage of, a more innocent person's honesty, credulity, or trustfulness. The technique is to allow a certain amount of evil to enter yourself, and then (statistically at least) you will always tend to be able to take advantage of a less evil person. It has a facile attractiveness; but it involves the disadvantage that the tempter gets entangled in, and probably lost in, an ever deepening matrix of evil. When a man allows evil to enter his thoughts and his being for some very worthwhile purpose, it then permeates him; and very soon he cannot see evil clearly for what it is. Next it begins to control his actions, without his being able to identify what it is that influences him, and urges him on. Quite soon he becomes lost in the matrix of evil, because his consciousness has become deformed so as no longer to be able to recognise evil as evil. What has happened once, can happen again. As soon as a man has become unaware of one degree of evil in himself, the stage is set for him to take the next step in this progressively downward spiral.
However if the tempter's fate is unenviable, his victim is hardly in any better position. He is taken advantage of at every turn. He is continually tempted to throw away what remains of his innocence. If he gives way, he shares the fate of the tempter; he gets lost in a matrix of evil. If he resists temptation, and clings ever more tightly to what he believes to be right, he may find that his righteousness is all that he is left with, and that all his practical schemes come to nothing. His enemies regard him as fair game, to be outwitted or outflanked at every opportunity. His friends are content to live at his expense emotionally, and permit his scrupulous conscience to do double duty and make up for their willingness to be more accommodating. In these liberal times…