Precept & Practice – FEBRUARY 18 – Perverted Good

Place a guard over your strong points!   Thrift may run into niggardliness, generosity into prodigality or shiftlessness.   Gentleness may become pusillanimity, tact become insincerity, power become oppression.  Characters need sentries at their points of weakness, true enough, but often the points of greatest strength are, paradoxically, really points of weakness.

Most evil is perverted good.   For instance, extravagance is generosity carried to excess.   Revenge is sometimes a sense of justice which has put no restraint upon itself.   Woman’s worst fault is perverted self-sacrifice.   Incaution comes from innocence.

Now there are some men who see all the evil, and never trace, never give themselves the trouble of suspecting the root of goodness out of which it sprung.

There are others who love to go deep down, and see why a man came to do wrong, and whether there was not some excuse, or some redeeming cause:  in order that they may be just.

The Reverend F. W. Robertson

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From the Introduction to Precept and Practice

The kindly welcome given to my other little books, ‘Being and Doing’ and ‘Character and Conduct,’ must be my excuse for adding another collection of extracts to the number now in circulation.

The quotations are gathered from the books of many earnest thinkers, and deal with Life in all its length and breadth, with ourselves, our characters, our plain unvarnished faults and weaknesses, our often untoward circumstances, and with all that drags us down;-  with our purposes, our religion, our love and friendships, and with all that uplifts us;-  with our relation to others, our influence and responsibilities, and finally with those stages of our journey which bring us to the Road’s Last Turn and to the Silent Land.

CONSTANCE  M. WHISHAW