Precept and Practice – SEPTEMBER 15 – Sinfulness – The Punishment of Sin

The blindness which is induced by all deliberate injury to our moral nature, and which thickens its film as the habit grows, is one of the most appalling expressions of the justice of God.

(James Martineau)

We are tempted to use temporal measures for the eternal:  to judge of the unseen by the material:  to forget that sinfulness is indeed the punishment of sin:  that the deadening of the higher powers, the narrowing, the imbruting of our nature is the most grievous penalty of wrong:  to forget that impunity in self-indulgence is the sorest sentence on vice against that awful time of awakening when in the splendid image of a Roman moralist the vision of abandoned Virtue shall be the doom of the soul hopelessly wasted by remorse.   So it is that we are tempted to regard chastisements as the expression of anger, and not as the tender discipline of wisdom.   We fail to discern that righteousness and love are, if I may so speak, the two sides of unchangeable holiness as it is seen in relation to the condition of men and in relation to the purpose of God.   So it is that when we ought to think of sin we think of pain.   We fix our attention upon a transitory, it may be a salutary, symptom and forget the disease.

(Bishop Westcott – The Victory of the Cross)

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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