The Expositor's Bible: The General Epistles of St. James and St. JudePlummer, Alfred
Religion
The Expositor's Bible: The General Epistles of St. James and St. Jude
Plummer, Alfred
Bible. James -- Commentaries; Bible. Jude -- Commentaries
Positivism will indeed have worked marvels when it has driven remorse
out of the world; and until it has succeeded in doing so, it will
remain confronted by an unanswerable proof--as universal as the
humanity which it professes to worship--that its moral system is based
upon a falsehood. Whether or no we admit the belief in a God, the fact
of self-reproach in every human heart remains to be accounted for. And
it is a fact of the most enormous proportions. Think of the years of
mental agony and moral torture which countless numbers of the human
race have endured since man became a living soul, because men have
invariably reproached themselves with the folly and wickedness which
they have committed. Think of the exquisite suffering which remorse
has inflicted on every human being who has reached years of reflexion.
Think of the untold misery which the misdeeds of men have inflicted
upon those who love and would fain respect them. It may be doubted
whether all other forms of human suffering, whether mental or bodily,
are more than as a drop in the ocean, compared with the agonies which
have been endured through the gnawing pangs of remorse for personal
misconduct, and of shame and grief for the misconduct of friends and
relations. And if the Determinist is right, all this mental torture,
with its myriad stabs and stings through centuries of centuries, is
based on a monstrous delusion. These bitter reproachers of themselves
and of those dearest to them might have been spared it all, if only
they had known that not one of the acts thus blamed and lamented in
tears of blood could have been avoided.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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