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Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin
page 100 of 155 (64%)
tried for a little while by having to wait for some promised good,
and it is all the sweeter when it comes. But you cannot carry the
trial past a certain point. Let the cold fasten on your hand in an
extreme degree, and your fingers will moulder from their sockets.
Fatigue yourself, but once, to utter exhaustion, and to the end of
life you shall not recover the former vigour of your frame. Let
heart-sickness pass beyond a certain bitter point, and the heart
loses its life for ever.

Now, the very definition of evil is in this irremediableness. It
means sorrow, or sin, which ends in death; and assuredly, as far as
we know, or can conceive, there are many conditions both of pain and
sin which cannot but so end. Of course we are ignorant and blind
creatures, and we cannot know what seeds of good may be in present
suffering, or present crime; but with what we cannot know we are not
concerned. It is conceivable that murderers and liars may in some
distant world be exalted into a higher humanity than they could have
reached without homicide or falsehood; but the contingency is not
one by which our actions should be guided. There is, indeed, a
better hope that the beggar, who lies at our gates in misery, may,
within gates of pearl, be comforted; but the Master, whose words are
our only authority for thinking so, never Himself inflicted disease
as a blessing, nor sent away the hungry unfed, or the wounded
unhealed.

Believe me then, the only right principle of action here, is to
consider good and evil as defined by our natural sense of both; and
to strive to promote the one, and to conquer the other, with as
hearty endeavour as if there were, indeed, no other world than this.
Above all, get quit of the absurd idea that Heaven will interfere to
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