Transgression

“ Not transgression shuts a man out from mercy. Transgression, which belongs to us all, makes us subjects for the mercy; but it is pride, self-righteousness, trust in ourselves, which 'bars the gates of mercy on mankind'; and the men that are condemned are condemned not only because they have transgressed the commandments of God, but 'this is the condemnation, that light came into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.'
And then (and but a word) we see here, too, the elements of which acceptable faith consists. ”

“ But the words passeth by transgression, signify that inasmuch as we confess our failings, and cover them with the fruit of our good works, they are referred to the author of our fault, and the instigator of our sin. For what else does he who confesses his fault do but prove himself to have been beguiled by the craft and malice of that spiritual wickedness which is his adversary? ”

“ Once, in an age and in a country, when and where household life continues to be ideal, one single wretch commits the first act of transgression by impetuously rushing into the circle of ascetics, or by dying before wholly discharging his duty to his family, the natural result is that both himself, his family, and his nation, become thereby seriously affected. ”

“ My transgressions, O Lord, are multiplied: my transgressions are multiplied, and I am not worthy to behold and see the height of heaven for the multitude of mine iniquities.
10 I am bowed down with many iron bands, that I cannot lift up mine head, neither have any release: for I have provoked thy wrath, and done evil before thee: I did not thy will, neither kept I thy commandments: I have set up abominations, and have multiplied offences. ”

“ MAN ORIGINALLY TRANSGRESSED, that is, made a mistake; for TO TRANSGRESS, TO FAIL, TO MAKE A MISTAKE, all mean the same thing.
"The consequences of Adam's transgression are inherited by the race; the first is ignorance." ”

“ The human eye never rests upon a sadder sight than a ruined soul, a mind shattered and debased by vice.
The Results of One Transgression.—The following case is a good illustration of the fact that a long course of transgression is not necessary to occasion the most serious results. A young man from an Eastern State who visited us for treatment was suffering with the usual consequences of self-abuse, but he asserted in the most emphatic manner that he had never committed the act of self-pollution but once in his life. ”

“ For, if ever the quality of a transgression requires severity, it should be so dealt with that both vengeance may correct the fault and grace not be denied afterwards to those that have been corrected. ”

“ The transgressions or short-comings of a servant vary from the trivial to the grave, and the evils which discharge may bring range through countless degrees from slight to serious. The penalty may be inflicted for a very small offense, and then there is wrong done, or, after numerous grave offenses, it may not be inflicted, and again there is wrong done. How shall be determined the degree of transgression beyond which to discharge is less wrong than not to discharge? ”

“ Effects upon Offspring.—That those guilty of the transgression should suffer, seems only just; but that an innocent being who had no part in the sin—no voice in the time or manner of its advent into the world—that such a one should suffer equally, if not more bitterly, with the transgressors themselves, seems anything but just. But such is nature's inexorable law, that the iniquities of the parents shall be visited upon the children ”

“ This is the course that has been pursued by the people generally, and those whom we can say the least of in relation to transgression have some sins to atone for and make restitution. We have been nearly all more or less in the dark. ”

“ And when his will is totally subdued, then a great many childish follies and inadvertencies may be past by. Some should be overlooked and taken no notice of, and others mildly reproved. But no wilful transgression should ever be forgiven, without chastisement, less or more. ”

“ Sin is but the cloud behind which the everlasting sun lies in all its power and warmth, unaffected by the cloud; and the light will yet strike, the light of His love will yet pierce through, with its merciful shafts bringing healing in their beams, and dispersing all the pitchy darkness of man's transgression. ”

“ One sin is a temptation to another, and there are troubles which, as a snare, come suddenly upon evil men in the midst of their transgressions; nay, their transgression itself often involves them in vexations; their sin is their punishment, and they are holden in the cords of their own iniquity, ch. v. 22. 2. The pleasantness of the way of holiness. The snare that is in the transgression of evil men spoils all their mirth, but righteous men are kept from those snares, or delivered out of them; they walk at liberty, walk in safety, and therefore they sing and rejoice. ”

“ Lift thy two hands every canonical hour [10]
towards the heavenly Lord of the nine grades;
pray . . . , even at the beginning,
forgiveness for thy transgression.
“We are not pure to converse with God,
since (our) transgression, since (our) impurity,
for our false, polluted mouths
are not clean, stainless, bright.
“Let us beseech the whole of the creatures
formed by God through His pure mysteries,
that they implore with us to the King of Justice
that our transgression be forgiven. ”

“ The laws say that none among men may be alone, ever and at any time, for this is the great transgression and the root of all evil. ”

“ The transgression of other negative commandments that involve no act causes little harm, and cannot always be avoided, as it consists in mere words: moreover, man's back would be inflicted with stripes an the year round if he were to be punished with stripes for each transgression of this kind. ”

“ I think I have pointed out, as clearly as my feeble language will permit, the condition of the whole human family, so far as it regards their fallen state, and so far as it regards their own individual transgressions. ”

“ The greatest crimes are regarded as mere transgressions of some arbitrary order. If such persons come in conflict with individuals, then, hatred, envy, and revenge take the place of coldness and negation, and their brutality and indifference to others know no bounds. ”

“ Who after his transgression doth repent,
Is half, or altogether innocent. ”

“ It is right that the more frequent transgressions and sins are, and the greater the probability of their being committed, the more severe must their punishment be, in order to deter people from committing them ”

“ And, again, the worst transgressions are not the passionate outbursts contradictory of the main direction of a life which sometimes come; but the habitual, though they be far smaller, evils which are honey-combing the moral nature. ”

“ The words reiterated all around stabbed to the heart; the actions of the assailants tended to a worse end,—to awaken every passion of which the human breast is susceptible; fear, anger, pride, resentment, revenge, alternately take possession of the whole man. ”

“ In disposition he is mild and affable, but when roused to indignation, his keen eyes glitter and flash, the muscles of his large mouth work convulsively, and he looks the very impersonation of the spirit of evil. He is implacable in anger, and bitter in revenge ”

“ Instead of the punishment there is seen a false glitter of gaudy life,—a glitter which is damnably false,—and which, alas, has been more often portrayed in glowing colours, for the injury of young girls, than have those horrors, which ought to deter, with the dark shadowings which belong to 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. ”

“ But when I have known that certain scholars were breaking rules and defying authority with malicious perverseness, I have felt more than resentment or anger—I have felt sorrow. When I have seen, as has sometimes happened of late, my boys banding together at night upon street corners, behaving offensively, moving surreptitiously, betraying by unmistakeable signs that they were engaged in stealthy and secret purposes, my alarm and distress has overcome both anger and sorrow. ”

“ If we reflect for one moment on the effects of the passions, we shall perceive the necessity of repressing them, if we would spare ourselves vain regrets and useless sorrows, which certainly always afflict those who obey not the laws. Thus, a single reflection will suffice to show the impropriety of anger, the dreadful consequences of revenge, calumny, and backbiting. ”

“ She had seen him flying from the house without waiting for the girl to recover consciousness. What finer scheme of vengeance could any woman hope for—and she had always heard that women were revengeful—than that which had been placed within her reach? ”

“ When he sat on his perch glancing sharply round with solitary pride, pride eminent and fierce, she dashed at him and threw him from his station savagely, she goaded him from his keen dignity of a male, she harassed him from his unperturbed pride, till he was mad with rage, his light brown eyes burned with fury, they saw her now, like flames of anger they flared at her and recognized her as the enemy. ”

“ Visionary terrors heighten the doubts, that he, for whose sake she endures all this, holds the sacrifice light. The domestic persecution—persecution the hardest to bear—goes on, eyes that once looked love, now turn on her in anger or disdain. ”

“ If this is really accomplished and some positive fact is established in the self-accusation, the question becomes one of finding the value seen by the confessor in blaming himself together with his fellow. Revenge, hatred, jealousy, envy, anger, suspicion, and other passions will be the forces in which this value will be found. One man brings his ancient comrade into jeopardy in revenge for the latter’s injustice in the division of the booty, or in deliberate anger at the commission of some dangerous stupidity in a burglary. ”

“ Now a scene of persecution and cruelty began which far exceeds in atrocity anything which history has related. Every tie of nature and society was broken, every duty and every relation violated, and torture forced from all alike false accusations, betrayal of friends, confession of impossible crimes ”

“ A savage has outraged me even in the very manner of punishing me! He has inflicted upon me that chastisement, the first effect of which is to shock one’s modesty; that most humiliating of chastisements, which takes one back to one’s childhood. ”

“ Hear how Tertullian raged against her: "She should always be veiled, clothed in mourning and in rags; that the eye may see in her a penitent, drowned in tears, and atoning for the sin of having ruined the human race. ”

“ But the whole order of society has been transformed. Revenge is now under the ban of the state, which has made itself responsible for the infliction of corporal punishment on individual transgressors. ”

“ That the man would have to undergo the punishment of bigamy in its severest form, there was no doubt;—but would law, and justice, and the prevailing desire for revenge, be able to get at him in such a way that he might be hung? ”

“ For the wretch who is doomed to go through the world bearing a personal jealousy or a personal malignity, which renders him incapable of doing justice, and studious of misrepresentation, I can only feel pity, and were it possible to feel revengeful, could consign him to no worse punishment than that of his own tormentors, the vipers nursed in his own breast. ”

“ Illustration of deliberate Resentment.—The law of retaliation which prevails among savage tribes, and which demands blood for blood, life for life, and exacts the fearful penalty with a justice inexorable and sure, though often long delayed, and which never loses sight of its victim, though years, and broad lands, and wide waters intervene, affords an illustration of deliberate in distinction from instinctive resentment. ”

“ How many fall from Affluence to Want, from Splendor to a Goal, thro’ the Inveteracy of Revenge! Not all the Concessions of the opposite Party, not all the Tears of his Wife, nor the impending Ruin of his Children, can appease the Revengeful: Savage-like, he quits not his Hold till his Fury is glutted, till his Adversary is destroyed. Besides these, there are many other Species of Revenge, less obvious indeed, but perhaps not less criminal: there are Men whose Fury is less, but whose Malice is equal: Men with cooler Heads, but with inveterate Hearts. ”

“ How awfully certain is it that "the way of the transgressor is hard!" This poor sufferer found it so; and as no iniquity can go unpunished, there must be a dreadful retribution for the man, who, not only shut up his bowels of compassion from him, in the day of his afflictions, but sported, like a demon, with his dreadful condition. ”

“ But the point I wish to emphasize now is that the majority of these negative emotions is caused directly or indirectly by man’s underlying and most distinguishing characteristic—his aggression. It is this trait that most clearly defines him, and it is this trait that is at the root of the frigid woman’s anger, fear of, and feeling of rejection by men. ”

“ The Drama of my Captivity and my Life as a Prisoner—The Commencement of Torture
My misfortunes, alas! are known to the public all over the world. But it is not on me that they weigh most heavily.
If calumny and persecution, assisted by the most powerful influences, have continually added blow upon blow, one truth, at least, is patent: I was not—I am not—mad, and those who endeavoured to affirm that I was insane, did so to their shame, and, I also hope, to their sorrow. ”