Character and Conduct – 4 June – Hearing Criticism
A MAN should never be ashamed to say he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser to-day than he was yesterday.
A MAN should never be ashamed to say he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser to-day than he was yesterday.
ANY insistence on heredity would have depreciated responsibility, and Jesus held every man to his own sin.
What course then did the father take, in the case before us, to pacify the angry passions of his ill-natured son?
…the son was supplied with valid arguments – stated in the last verse of the chapter – against his conduct, but he was first plied with love.
Though rules and tradition help us access the wisdom and grace of the past we should not be in the business of allowing them to hinder us to answer the call to listen, to love, and to heal and that immediately.
… if a man rolls back his deeds upon those who are his past, then where will responsibility be found at all, and of what poor cowardly stuff is each of us?
The harvest of hate is a wasteland bearing nothing but dust and ashes. The fruit of inclusion is a rainbow of flowers that brings joy wherever it is allowed to bloom.
REMORSE and repentance are two very different things. Repentance leads back to life; but remorse ends often in the painless apathy and fatal mortification of despair.
CONSCIENCE is harder than our enemies, knows more, accuses with more nicety,
LOOKING within myself, I note how thin aplank of station, chance, or prosperous fate, doth fence me from the clutching waves of sin;-
I HAVE often observed in the course of my experience of human life, that every man, even the worst, has something good about him;