Scripture Texts Illustrated By General Literature

Reprint of the original, first published in 1871.

Our most powerful female writer of fiction has emphatically taught, if a striking story can teach, that there is no sort of wrong deed of which a man can bear the punishment alone; you can’t isolate yourself, and say that the evil which is in you shall not spread. Men’s lives are as thoroughly blended with each other as the air they breathe; evil spreads as necessarily as disease. “I know, I feel the terrible extent of suffering this sin of Arthur’s has caused to others,” — so the good rector tells one who cherishes vengeance on the wrong-doer; “but so does every sin cause suffering to others besides those who commit it.” The problem how far a man is to be held responsible for the unforeseen consequences of his own deed this speaker pronounces to be one that might well make us tremble to look into it; the evil consequences that may lie folded in a single act of selfish indulgence being a thought so awful that it ought surely to awaken some feeling less presumptuous than a rash and vindictive desire to punish...FROM THE BOOK.

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