Condemned

“ Every man who is condemned according to the laws of his country and the judicial forms of his time is condemned justly, his possible innocence being henceforth in the hands of God: before men he is and must remain guilty. ”

“ A Philosopher, included in the same sentence of condemnation with several guilty persons among whom he had been apprehended, sent the following lines, composed suddenly in the moment when he was going to death, to a certain King whom had ignorantly condemned him. ”

“ A condemned criminal is offered his life if he will wed a wicked woman. "O King," he cried, "slay me; for rather would I die once, than suffer many deaths every day." Again, once a wicked woman pursued a heroic man. ”

“ On the other hand, injustice, falsehood, enmity, treachery, cruelty, adultery, theft, murder and similar dispositions and acts in their thousand forms of unmistakable manifestation, are universally condemned. ”

“ When we "keep consciences void of offence, toward God and men, then are we satisfied from ourselves," and expect the approbation of our judge. When we act differently, we are condemned of ourselves, and tremble to approach the enlightened tribunal. ”

“ He was condemned and punished because he hearkened to the voice of his wife, rather than to the command of his Maker; and we will assuredly be condemned and punished for obeying Man rather than God, if we do not speedily repent and bring forth fruits meet for repentance. ”

“ He condemned nothing in haste and without taking circumstances into account. He said, "Examine the road over which the fault has passed." ”

“ The Wood-Sawyer One year and three months. During all that time Lucie was never sure, from hour to hour, but that the Guillotine would strike off her husband’s head next day. Every day, through the stony streets, the tumbrils now jolted heavily, filled with Condemned. Lovely girls; bright women, brown-haired, black-haired, and grey; youths; stalwart men and old; gentle born and peasant born; all red wine for La Guillotine, all daily brought into light from the dark cellars of the loathsome prisons, and carried to her through the streets to slake her devouring thirst. ”

“ And as that word of dreadful condemnation awes each lurid spark of hasty anger from your soul, let these words of endless peace, and joy, and mercy steal in, and soften all your spirit into gentlest pity, tenderness, and love: "Brethren, if any of you do err from the truth, and one convert him; let him know, that he which converteth the sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death, and shall hide a multitude of sins." ”

“ The condition on which you may describe sin is that you condemn the sinner. In life also, as well as in literature, we are condemnatory; we love to pass judgment on others. How different in Russian literature! You find no condemnatory spirit there. The author’s whole passion is to defend and explain the criminal, to evoke the tender sympathy of the reader. He makes you feel how strange, how pathetic, is man’s destiny, how sordid his life compared with his spirit. ”

“ Cry out into the world your “wild and guilty fantasy” of property in man, and every echo responds with a cry of horror or contempt; every breeze, from whatever point of the compass it may come, brings you a verdict of condemnation. ”

“ Come now, and say, that you only do as others do. It is exactly by that you condemn yourselves. What! the most terrible certainty of your condemnation shall become the only motive for your confidence! Which, according to the Scriptures, is the road that conducts to death? Is it not that which the majority pursues? Which is the party of the reprobate? Is it not the multitude? You do nothing but what others do. ”

“ Is He, forsooth, only to condemn that man whom we think deserving of condemnation? Shall we look upon it as an absurdity, that He should condemn the man whose lot it is to be declared deserving of damnation? [270] Shall we consider it wrong that He should harden whom He chooses to harden, and have mercy on whom He wills to have mercy? ”

“ Never, while I have power, shalt thou darken the child’s soul with thy foul thirst of revenge, insult the presence of thy master with the crime he so abhorred, nor the temple of Him who came to pardon, with thy hatred. ”

“ Who meets with the smallest condemnation, or rather, who does not meet with sympathy and benevolence, for any amount of evil which he may have brought upon himself and those dependent on him, by this species of incontinence? ”

“ The harsh, stern, vindictively pure and good people—in my humble judgment—have many and grave sins to answer for as well as those whom they so mercilessly condemn. I condemn all that which appears evil to me, and I seek to avoid it, but I condemn no man, no woman. ”

“ It is very easy to make and strengthen a plea on either side, for each had a cause and found justification for standing for it, even to the most dire extremities. It is enough to say that our sympathy, at least, goes with the barbarous victims of their own blind and dauntless effort to resist what we call their destiny; and that the weight of condemnation must come on the English for suspicions and unwise measures and actual wrongs, in the early stages of the strife. ”

“ On the contrary, when we gaze upon the progress of the vicious and the criminal, however successful and prosperous in their brief space of action, to contempt and indignation, to disgust and horror, are added the same consciousness of a hereafter, and the certainty of an awful retribution. ”

“ The principle of condemnation, in all ages of the world, is no other than rejecting the very message which God sends to them while they pretend to cleave closely to that which He has sent in former ages. ”

“ That even those whom we justly condemn we should condemn moderately, and with a great deal of temper, because we know not but afterwards we may see cause to think better of them, and both to make use of them and make friendship with them, and we should so regulate our resentments that if it should prove so we may not afterwards be ashamed of them. ”

“ A RULE OF LIFE
‘If you want to annoy an opponent thoroughly, and even to harm him,’ said a crafty old knave to me, ‘you reproach him with the very defect or vice you are conscious of in yourself. Be indignant ... and reproach him!
‘To begin with, it will set others thinking you have not that vice.
‘In the second place, your indignation may well be sincere.... You can turn to account the pricks of your own conscience. ”

“ Some experience, which would be nothing but a hideous cruelty and outrage to ask too closely about—one, perhaps, which he could, even if he would, poor fellow, give no account of—has put him temporarily at the world’s mercy. ”

“ Those who made the perpetrators ignorant through oppression, and savage by misrule. The responsibilities of a certain order through many centuries were called to judgment during the brief period before us; and the sentence of condemnation not only went forth on the four winds to the farthest corners of the globe, but shall be repeated down to those remote ages when it shall be forgotten on earth, though recorded in heaven, that man ever shed the blood of man. ”

“ Ah, is that true, you loved and still love? Then contempt perishes, and hate takes its place. Write your confession, and die by my hand. Vengeance is foreign to contempt, you have risen to the level at which hate can act. ”

“ Could these men and women who had so long borne the bitterest yoke, who had been accustomed to the spectacle of the most ferocious punishments, when suddenly untrammelled, act with perfect clemency, moderation, or humanity? ”

“ Where death's the prize of conquest, and defeat Seals its own safety, yet remains unblest! But indignation at their fond deceit, And rage, the more inflames the tyrant's breast, The more this constant pair the palm of guilt contest. ”

“ I announce that I am idle, in fact, to prevent the idea spreading that I am idle. The art of defence is attack. I defend myself by attacking myself, and claim a verdict of not guilty by the candour of my confession of guilt. ”

“ What is laid to my charge, beyond that I have lived like a gentleman, and striven to eat and drink and dress like one? And I’ll wager my life that for one who will blame him, there will be ten—no, not ten, fifty—to condemn me. ”

“ But unfortunately, when you are dealing with crimes of violence, moral suasion and gentle treatment produce nothing more poignant in the bosom of your adversary than a sensation of amused and derisive contempt. ”

“ No one more sincerely regrets the insults offered his person, and the injury done to his property; but I cannot restrain my indignation, when I hear the public virtue, that so promptly recoils from undue violence, stigmatized as time-serving conwardice. ”

“ The magistrates, the constables, and the multitudinous crowd which followed them, all stood in silence and what we may call thunderstruckness, so little credence had they given to the assurances of Gregory Myrtle; for let it be remembered, that the first effect produced by an accusation against any one, upon vulgar minds, is to lead them at once to condemn him. I am afraid there is something in the human heart that loves the act of condemnation--an act which either gratifies malignity or vanity. ”

“ Here a state of condemnation (defined in verse 29 as a state in which men do evil) is described as a state of death from which men pass, by hearing and believing, into a state of life. This passing from death to life is further explained in the following verse, “The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and they that hear shall live.” ”

“ Worthy wrote him a letter in which he expatiated on the injustice of our impatience, and on the folly of our vindicating ourselves from guilt in the distinctions we make between those trials which seem to come more immediately from God, and those which proceed directly from the faults of our fellow-creatures. "Sickness, losses, and death, we think," continued he, "we dare not openly rebel against; while we fancy we are quite justified in giving loose to our violence when we suffer by the hand of the oppressor, the unkindness of the friend, or the disobedience of the child. ”

“ Whence it comes to pass, that in their results we have sometimes found the same spirit of cruelty and revenge, of malice and pride, the same blindness and obstinacy and unsteadiness, the same ungovernable rage and anger, the same injustice, sophistry, and fraud, that ever lodged in the breast of any individual. ”

“ And this shews, that evil examples, in superiors, are doubly pernicious, and doubly culpable, because such persons are bad themselves, and not only do no good, but much harm to others; and the condemnation of such must, to be sure, be so much the greater!—And how much the greater still must my condemnation be, who have had such a religious education under you, and been so well nurtured by my good lady, if I should forget, with all these mercies heaped upon me, what belongs to the station I am preferred to!—O how I long to be doing some good! ”

“ Have we no evils and sins of our own, which, if the Divine justice were to call us to account for, as rigorously as we are ready to call our fellow-men to account for theirs, would bring down fearful condemnation on our heads? ”

“ Every one suspects me, but none dare reproach me. You on the contrary, are the butt against which every censure is levelled: they know, that your easy nature can pardon malignity, and the hand that insults you to-day will crave your kindness to-morrow. When you are offended, with puerile impotence and passionate violence, you exhibit the effects of your momentary rage ”

“ It is wonderful how forward some have been to look upon it as a kind of presumption and ingratitude, and rebellion, and cruelty, and I know not what besides, not to allege only, nor to own, but to suffer any one so much as to imagine, that an old-established law could in any respect be a fit object of condemnation. ”

“ My conduct will justify itself to all those whose opinions are truly worthy of regard; and as for the bullying denunciation of those few miscreants whose highest ambition is to be known as the lamp-lighters and candle-snuffers of mortal combats—combats which the laws of God and man pronounce to be murder—as for their denunciation, my now wishing you a good morning shows how thoroughly I despise it. ”

“ Seeing, then, that in every act of cruelty or violence it is more than likely that either one or other of these factors has been at work, is it fair that we should so readily condemn and therewith rest content? ”

“ But it is in vain, that I torment myself with endeavouring to extinguish the remorse I feel in attempting to induce the sacred laws, the monument of publick confidence, the foundation of human morality, to authorise dissimulation and perfidy. ”

“ How long will it take an individual or a nation to conquer prejudices, by continuing to practice and excuse them;—substituting general acknowledgements of their guilt, for immediately and thoroughly repudiating them? ”

“ The most usual way of appeasing the indignation of such as we have any way offended, when we see them in possession of the power of revenge, and find that we absolutely lie at their mercy, is by submission, to move them to commiseration and pity ”

“ Those who thus set up for judges and censurers shall receive the greater condemnation. Our judging others will but make our own judgment the more strict and severe, Matt. vii. 1, 2. Those who are curious to spy out the faults of others, and arrogant in passing censures upon them, may expect that God will be as extreme in marking what they say and do amiss. 2. Another reason given against such acting the master is because we are all sinners: In many things we offend all, v. 2. Were we to think more of our own mistakes and offenses, we should be less apt to judge other people. ”

“ When, therefore, such wretched worms of the earth as we are presume to offend and insult this God of infinite dignity, by transgressing His commands, and preferring ourselves or any creature to Him, the malice of such conduct is in a manner infinite, for we find among ourselves that the grievousness of any injury always increases in proportion to the dignity of the person offended above the one who injures him. ”