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.

… 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.