It would seem, indeed, as though the sense of sin did not reside in the
act at all, but only in the sense that the act is committed in defiance
of light and higher instinct. Even our own morality, on which we pride
ourselves, how confused and topsy-turvy it is in many respects! How
monstrous it is that a hungry man should be punished legally for theft,
while an ill-tempered and unjust parent or schoolmaster should be
allowed, year after year, to make the lives of the children about them
into misery and heaviness. Life is full of such examples, where no
agency whatever is, or can be, brought to bear by society upon a
notorious wrecker of human happiness, so long as he is prudent and
wary.
It is the slowness of it all that is so disheartening; the
impossibility that dogs the efforts of the high-minded, the kind, the
just, of prevailing against tradition and prejudice and stupidity; the
grim acquiescence in sanctioned oppression that characterises a certain
type of respectable virtue; the melancholy ineffectiveness of kindly
persons, the lamentable lack of proportion that mars the work of the
enthusiastic faddist--these things tempt one at times, in moments of
despair and dreariness, to believe that the one lesson of life is meant
to be a hopeless patience, a dull acquiescence in deeply-rooted evil.
It is bewildering to see a world so out of joint, and to feel that the
one force that has worked wonders is the discontent with things as they
are.
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