the very same thing himself. And so we bribe our consciences as well as
neglect them, and they need to be educated.

Thus, down below every life there lies a great dim region of habits and
impulses and fleeting emotions, into which it is the rarest thing for a
man to go with a candle in his hand to see what it is like.

But I can imagine a man saying, 'Well, if I do not know that I am doing
wrong, how can it be a sin?' In answer to that, I would say that, thank
God! ignorance diminishes criminality, but ignorance does not alter the
nature of the deed. Take a simple illustration. Here is a man who, all
unconsciously to himself, is allowing worldly prosperity to sap his
Christian character. He does not know that the great current of his life
has been turned aside, as it were, by that sluice, and is taken to drive
the wheels of his mill, and that there is only a miserable little
trickle coming down the river bed. Is he any less guilty because he does
not know? Is he not the more so, because he might and would have known
if he had thought and felt right? Or, here is another man who has the
habit of letting his temper get the better of him. He calls it 'stern
adherence to principle,' or 'righteous indignation'; and he thinks
himself very badly used when other people 'drive him' so often into a
temper. Other people know, and _he_ might know, if he would be honest
with himself, that, for all his fine names, it is nothing else than
passion. Is he any the less guilty because of his ignorance? It is plain
enough that, whilst ignorance, if it is absolute and inevitable, does
diminish criminality to the vanishing point, the ignorance of our own
faults which most of us display is neither absolute nor inevitable; and
therefore, though it may, thank God! diminish, it does not destroy our
guilt. 'She wipeth her mouth and saith, I have done no harm': was she,
therefore, chaste and pure? In all our hearts there are many vermin