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Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays by Timothy Titcomb
page 94 of 263 (35%)
from perverseness, in all our dealings with young and old, and in
all our estimates of human character. When a child obeys a man, or
when one man obeys another, it should always be for good and
sufficient reason. Neither child nor man should be expected to
surrender his right to himself without the presentation to him of
the proper motive. When, yielding to this motive, the soul
consents to be directed or led, it becomes obedient. Compulsion
may secure conformity, but never obedience. If I, as a child or
man, am to yield myself to the direction of any other man, that
man is bound to present to me an adequate motive for the
surrender. God throws upon me personal responsibility--gives me to
myself--and no man, parent or otherwise, can make me truly
obedient without giving me the motive for obedience. When a child
or a man fails to yield to the legitimate motives of obedience, he
is perverse, and it is about perverseness in some of its forms of
manifestation that I propose to talk in this article.

At starting, I must give perverseness a somewhat broader meaning
than that thus far indicated. I will say that that person is
perverse who, from vanity, or pride of opinion and will, or
malice, or any mean consideration, refuses to yield his conduct
and himself to those motives and influences which his reason and
conscience recognize to be pure and good and true. In its least
aggravated form, perhaps, we find it among lovers. Women will
sometimes persistently ignore a passion which they know has taken
full possession of them, and grieve the heart that loves them by a
coldness and indifference which they do not feel at all. Rather
than acknowledge their affection for one whose loss would kill
them, or, what would be the same thing, kill the world for them,
they have lied, grown sick, and gone nearly insane. This is a
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