Wrongness

“ And the specifically moral emotion excited by the idea of a wrong action, seems to me to contain essentially a more or less vague cognition of the kind of intrinsic evils, which are usually caused by wrong actions, whether they would or would not be caused by the particular action in question. I am, in fact, unable to distinguish, in its main features, the moral sentiment excited by the idea of rightness and wrongness, wherever it is intense, from the total state constituted by a cognition of something intrinsically evil together with the emotion of hatred directed towards it. ”

“ If we take deliberate and purposeful actions such as Joffre's and the deceitful girl's, in which, as we have seen, there is both a definite end and a system of feelings, can we say that the rightness of the action depends solely on the feelings? Was Joffre's action right merely because he loved his country? Was the girl's deception wrong, simply because she felt jealous of her rival? It would be absurd to believe that. The rightness and wrongness of actions depends not on the feeling alone, but on the feeling plus the end that is purposed. And both of these are included in the motive. ”

“ Restrain yourself, therefore, from all iniquity, and do that which is good." "What, sir," say I, "are the evil deeds from which we must restrain ourselves?" "Hear," says he: "from adultery and fornication, from unlawful revelling, from wicked luxury, from indulgence in many kinds of food and the extravagance of riches, and from boastfulness, and haughtiness, and insolence, and lies, and backbiting, and hypocrisy, from the remembrance of wrong, and from all slander. These are the deeds that are most wicked in the life of men. ”

“ But you know not--oh! you know not, you who have lived in one course of integrity and honour, how entanglements and temptations crowd upon one, how they interweave a net, from which the heart, were it as strong as a lion, could not break forth, when once we have plunged into a course of wrong,--how the evil wish begets the evil act,--how the evil act calls to the lie to conceal it,--how the lie, in its shame, has recourse to a new crime to cover it. ”

“ We are all human, and all do wrong.” ”

“ WE read the world wrong and say that it deceives us. ”

“ When you keep yourselves back from doing a wrong thing, because you know it is wrong, is it for love of heaven, or for mere fear of being punished in hell? Some of you will answer boldly at once: “For neither one nor the other; when we keep from wrong, it is because we hate and despise what is wrong: when we do right it is because it is right and we ought to do it. ”

“ I cannot say that I believe in doing evil that good may come. I do not. I think that any man who honestly justifies such course deceives himself. But this I can say: to call any act evil, instantly begs the question. Many an act that man does is right or wrong according to the time and place which form, so to speak, its context; strip it of its surrounding circumstances, and you tear away its meaning. Gentlemen reformers, beware of this common practice of yours! beware of calling an act evil on Tuesday because that same act was evil on Monday! ”

“ The sense of wrong, of hardship, of bitterness, of personal injustice, seems by degrees to melt away from it, and therefore it can be better faced. At least it is well that we should tell ourselves so. ”

“ Those that live in this world must expect to have injuries done them, affronts given them, and trouble wrongfully created them, for we dwell among briers. Now here we are told what to do when we have wrong done us. 1. We must not avenge ourselves, no, nor so much as think of revenge, or design it: " Say not thou, no, not in thy heart, I will recompense evil for evil. Do not please thyself with the thought that some time or other thou shalt have an opportunity of being quits with him. ”

“ Now I ask you to think, dear friends, of this, that that obstinate condition of dogged determination to do a wrong thing, knowing it to be a wrong thing, is a condition to which all evil steadily tends. ”

“ Are we men in whose bosoms burns the desire to sweep off the face of the earth all unruth and injustice and wrong? or are we, as some men say of us, but varlets whose envy and greed make us lust for the ease of the gentles? ”

“ By such wicked practices as these men show such a greediness of the world, such a love of themselves, such a contempt of mankind in general, of the particular persons they deal with, and of the sacred laws of justice, as prove them to have in their hearts neither the fear nor the love of that God who has so plainly said that false weights and balances are an abomination to him. ”

“ We say that it is wrong to murder, to steal, to tell lies, and that it is right to take care of our families. When we say in this sense that one action is right and another wrong, we have a certain feeling toward the action which is peculiar and not quite like any other feeling. ”

“ What afflicted and terrified him far more than all this, was the perversion of all ideas, this fearful evil, the corrupting of all notions; vice, in truth, is taken for virtue, virtue counted for vice. ”

“ In former days it was—"love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance." What is the fruit of the spirit of evil? Envy, malice, hatred, evil-speaking, lying and slandering one another and towards other people. ”

“ And we saw how, beyond judgment and even beyond what’s what, is a spirit that has got to come and clutch hold of life before such wrongs, and more wrongs, and all the wrongs that ail us, can stop being. ”

“ He felt now the smarting anger, the outraged vanity of the wrong-doer who, having argued down his own conscience, and believing he has blinded others as himself, suddenly finds that himself and his motives are naked before the world. ”

“ If there be some who have brought evil accusations of greed upon me, why, what matters it, if a man’s conscience be right with his Maker? And you, my lord, will surely know the calamitous and miserable calumniations put upon our poor human nature? ”

“ And thousands of us, contradicting and abusing one another, all printed and wrote—teaching others. And without noticing that we knew nothing, and that to the simplest of life's questions: What is good and what is evil? ”

“ We know that the wicked angels appointed laws conformable to their own wickedness, in which the men who are like them delight: and the right Reason, [11] when He came, proved that not all opinions nor all doctrines are good, but that some are evil, while others are good. Wherefore, I will declare the same and similar things to such men as these, and, if need be, they shall be spoken of more at large. ”

“ How could there be an evil act which did not proceed from an antecedent evil principle or disposition? What becomes of the great common notion of mankind, on which his demonstration is erected? But we must allow the author to contradict himself, since he has now come around to the truth, that an evil act of the creature may and must have preceded the existence of moral evil in the world. ”

“ The great wrong, in a mistake or a sin like yours, is that it reaches out and injures those who are guiltless. Two people make laws unto themselves and say, 'It is no one's business—we wrong no one save ourselves.' Yet invariably others are eventually wronged. ”

“ That is the bitterest of all—to wear the yoke of our own wrong-doing. But if you submitted to that as men submit to maiming or life-long incurable disease?—and made the unalterable wrong a reason for more effort toward a good, that may do something to counterbalance the evil? One who has committed irremediable errors may be scourged by that consciousness into a higher course than is common. ”

“ To say nothing of those evils one man brings upon another, as poverty, imprisonment, infamy, dishonesty, racks, snares, treachery, reproaches, actions, deceits--but I'm got into as endless a work as numbering the sands--for what offenses mankind have deserved these things, or what angry god compelled them to be born into such miseries is not my present business. ”

“ When one does wrong, one must do it thoroughly. ”

“ Are we to say that we are never intentionally to do wrong, or that in one way we ought and in another way we ought not to do wrong, or is doing wrong always evil and dishonourable, as I was just now saying, and as has been already acknowledged by us? ”

“ But what renders your injustice toward the pious still more cruel, is, that it is your own examples, your irregularities, and even your censures, which stagger, weaken, and force them sometimes to imitate you; it is the corruption of your manners which becomes the continual and the most dangerous snare to their innocence; it is those foolish derisions with which you continually assault virtue, that force them reluctantly to shelter themselves under the appearances of guilt. ”

“ Examine yourselves whenever you are blamed, and do your utmost to correct what is amiss in you. "Blessed are ye," said our Lord, "when men shall revile you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely." ”

“ This is the day whereon the wise should seek the advice of this Wronged One, and ask Him Who is the Truth what things are conducive to the glory and tranquillity of men. And yet, all are earnestly striving to put out this glorious and shining light, and are diligently seeking either to establish Our guilt, or to voice their protest against Us. Matters have come to such a pass, that the conduct of this Wronged One hath, in every way, been grossly misrepresented, and in a manner which it would be unseemly to mention. ”

“ But it may be observed also, that a virtuous temper of mind, consciousness of innocence, and good meaning towards everybody, and a strong feeling of injustice and injury, may, itself, such is the imperfection of our virtue, lead a person to violate this obligation, if he be not upon his guard. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Or how can it consist with his justice to require of men to know certainly the meaning of those words which he himself hath not revealed? [7] ——For my error or ignorance in what is not plainly contained in Scripture, after my best endeavour used; to say that God will damn me for such errors, who am a lover of him, and lover of truth, is to rob man of his comfort, and God of his goodness; is to make man desperate, and God a Tyrant. ”

“ Blame not us that the lower spirits manifest for those who bid them welcome. Blame man's insensate folly, which will choose the low and grovelling rather than the pure and elevated. Blame his foolish laws, which daily hurry into a life for which they are unprepared, thousands of spirits, hampered and dragged down by a life of folly and sin, which has been fostered by custom and fashion. ”

“ What gives poignancy to these ideas is the real sense of wrong-doing, which projects a monstrous and exaggerated shadow.
The sense of duty, constantly worked, breeds in sensitive souls the despair of an unattainable perfection. ”

“ Every wrong act we perform inflicts an injury upon our moral consciousness, and a wound upon our sense of right, and inflicts a lasting injury upon our moral dignity, if it does not create a painful sense of wrong. ”

“ "That is the bitterest of all—to wear the yoke of our own wrong-doing. ”

“ Now, to these three pretexts, let us oppose three incontrovertible truths. To the pretext of the lightness of the faults; that the more the faults which you censure are light, the more is the slander unjust: — first truth. To the pretext of the public notoriety; that the more the faults of our brethren are known, the more cruel is the slander which censures them: — second truth. To the pretext of zeal; that the same charity, which, in piety, makes us hate sinners, makes us likewise cover the multitude of their faults: — last truth. ”

“ But in matters of right and wrong, whatever be the lures, the taunts, or the usages of the world, or whatever the supposed inconveniences of singularity, let judgment and conscience always rule with absolute sway. ”

“ Difference of manner may go for a great deal, but beyond and below the resentment caused by a prompt, decisive, and perhaps imperious tone, lies a deeply-rooted sense of wrong—logically or illogically arrived at. ”

“ The wickedness and folly of this world are not at the doors of the wicked and foolish alone, but also at the doors of those honest and good men, whose weakness and laziness,—let me say whose gentility,—cause them to suffer what they have the power to prevent. ”

“ If the good which men have and feel, penetrates into their speech, and leaves its deposit there, so does also the evil. Thus we may trace a constant tendency—in too many cases it has been a successful one—to empty words employed in the condemnation of evil, of the depth and earnestness of the moral reprobation which they once conveyed. ”

“ I was pleased to see the energy displayed all the way through on both sides, and I think this is the general feeling that prevails—a determination to ferret out wrong and to correct evil. One thing is just as necessary as the other. ”

“ If we harbour vindictiveness, hatred, malice, and a spirit that produces evil within us, we are so far given up to the power of evil. But when I say that I am opposed to evil principles and their consequent practices, I use an expression that I think you can understand. ”

“ We recognise that things are unalterably so ordered that by no possibility could lying, slander, malice and hatred be other than intrinsically evil, and their opposites be other than essentially good. ”

“ Envy, anger and avarice reign among some; modesty is banished among others; these abandon themselves to intemperance and sloth, and the pride of these rises to insolence. It is all over; I will dwell no longer among the seven deadly sins."
LE SAGE (Gil-Blas) .
I must take my courage with both hands to continue to unfold before you the events however simple of this simple tale. Already I hear the eternal flock of hypocrites and fools protesting and crying out at outraged morality. I know them, these indignant voices of the defenders of morality. ”