Its prime case history involves a young Los Angeles woman named Angela, who shows worrying symptoms of housing an evil presence – foul temper, a tendency to behave erratically in taxis and an ability to make hapless policemen do horrible things with lightbulbs.
Perfection was to be the goal of all those who desired to be altogether Christian; it implied that the God who is good enough to forgive sin (justify) is obviously great enough to transform the sinners into saints (sanctify), thus enabling them to be free from outward sin as well as from "evil thoughts and tempers"—in short, to attain to a measure of holiness.
The drug-game stories are lucid and disturbing — a conscience always tempering his evil tendencies.
"Just as a man needs to repent of these sins involving acts, so he needs to investigate and repent of any evil dispositions, such as hot temper, hatred, jealousy, quarrelling, scoffing, eager pursuit of wealth or honors".
In every case, as in the Greek plays, the destructive forces seem to combine inner inadequacies or evils, such as Lear's temper or Macbeth's ambition, with external pressures, such as Lear's "tiger daughters," the witches in Macbeth, or Lady Macbeth's importunity.
His fierceness of spirit was composed of two elements, a serious Calvinistic desire to denounce evil and a habitual nervous ill temper, for which he often reproached himself but which he never managed to defeat.
Although the Pope suggested earlier this year that contraception could be used – in a departure from Catholic teaching – to prevent infection with Zika, he tempered the advice by calling it a lesser evil.
On the other hand, Robert Sprinkle argues that the observation that evil may not be an eliminable feature of the human condition should temper our hopes regarding the possibility of effectively addressing all forms of evil, not raise them: "I, for one, never held such a hope" ([ 16]: 89).
