The Greatest Thing In the World and Other Addresses by Henry Drummond
page 79 of 118 (66%)
page 79 of 118 (66%)
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you by taking thought can add a cubit to his stature?" Put down that
method forever as being futile. The one redeeming feature of the self-sufficient method is this--that those who try it find out almost at once that it will not gain the goal. 2. Another experimenter says: "But that is not my method. I have seen the folly of a mere wild struggle in the dark. I work on a principle. My plan is not to waste power on random effort, but to concentrate on a single sin. By taking ONE AT A TIME and crucifying it steadily, I hope in the end to extirpate all." To this, unfortunately, there are four objections: For one thing, life is too short; the name of sin is legion. For another thing, to deal with individual sins is to leave the rest of the nature for the time untouched. In the third place, a single combat with a special sin does not affect the root and spring of the disease. If you dam up a stream at one place, it will simply overflow higher up. If only one of the channels of sin be obstructed, experience points to an almost certain overflow through some other part of the nature. Partial conversion is almost always accompanied by such moral leakage, for the pent-up energies accumulate to the bursting point, and the last state of that soul may be worse than the first. In the last place, religion does not consist in negatives, in stopping this sin and stopping that. The perfect character can never be produced with a pruning knife. |
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