Is The Bible Worth Reading, and Other Essays — John Shaqi
Is The Bible Worth Reading, and Other EssaysWashburn, L. K. (Lemuel Kelley)
Religion
Is The Bible Worth Reading, and Other Essays
Washburn, L. K. (Lemuel Kelley)
Free thought
The world no longer permits the stronger to kill the weaker, but it allows
the wealthy to oppress the poor. Money is holier than man. Human life is
less sacred than property. To save a dollar is regarded as a more
necessary virtue than to save a human heart. Society cares more for
fortune than for truth. It is easier to win your way with hypocrisy than
with honesty. The world does not ask: What are you worth morally? but,
what are you worth financially? Self-interest has made it the object of
life to injure our fellows. To get an advantage over another is the
victory man seeks. One must fall that another may rise.
Those who are at the bottom support those who are on top. The toilers are
the foundation of society. We need to be more careful of what is beneath
us than of what is above us. “I write not these things to shame you, but
to warn you.”
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When you are falling, you cannot stop where you wish to.
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The power that conquers men to-day must be the power of enlightened
opinion.
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Two dollars given to the son do not atone for one stolen from the father.
MAN
The Hebrew psalmist sings of man:—“Thou madest him a little lower than the
angels.” A modern psalmist writing on this subject says:—“Man was made a
little higher than the brutes.” Man is a rare animal; he is the only
animal that can make a fire, but he is more than a brute. We do not know
how much less than an angel he is, for we do not know the dimensions of an
angel.
What we do know is, that this strange, rare being, called man, is capable
of doing a good deed, but is prone to do a bad one; that he has developed
virtues above the brute and vices below the brute; that he is better in
public than in private, and yet take him all in all he might be worse. We
have had the weakness of human nature preached until we have almost come
to expect man to be immoral and vicious, and are surprised if anyone
asserts that man is strong enough to resist temptation, and disappointed
if he does not come up, or down, to our expectations of vileness and
wickedness.
While we have faith in man in the minority rather than in the majority,
still we are inclined to think that most men are bad from circumstance
more than from choice. We trust to better conditions for better men, and
depend upon our best men to establish such conditions.
There is some criticism of virtue that vice offers which is as pertinent
as the censure of vice which virtue indulges in. We admit that there are a
great many sinners that are preferable to some kinds of saints, who are no
more to blame for their sins than their more fortunate fellow-beings are
for their saintliness. But we do not mean to say that every good man is a
villain in disguise, nor every rogue a righteous man who has not been
found out.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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