… 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?

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; 

The sins that we respectable people commit lightly every day, of pride and indolence and indifference to the sufferings of the poor, may be worse in His sight than the most flagrant sins of those who know no better.

You cannot be good and do wrong.    You cannot be righteous and do unrighteousness.  

But the habit of mind which leads us to palliate our sins and find good excuses for them, has this dangerous tendency, that it blinds us to the evil of evil.

TRIED by final tests, and reduced to its essential elements, sin is the preference of self to God, and the assertion of the human will against the Will of God.