An Appeal to the People in Behalf of Their Rights as Authorized Interpreters of the Bible

by Catharine Esther Beecher

Again, the effect of wrong action on the susceptibilities is as ominous as it is on the power of choice. We have seen that the design of painful emotions is to stimulate to the formation of good habits, and that when this legitimate object is not effected these emotions continually decrease in strength and vividness, so that the designed benefit is lost. Thus fear is designed to induce habits of caution, but if no such habits are the result, danger ceases to excite this emotion, and a man becomes at once fearless and careless. So with sympathy in the sufferings of others; if no habits of benevolent efforts to relieve are induced, that sensibility diminishes, and men become at once unsympathising, hard and cruel. So it is with shame; if it does not lead to habits of honor and duty, the susceptibility continually diminishes. And so it is with remorse; if habits of rectitude are not induced by its emotions, the conscience becomes “seared as with hot iron.”

But the most deteriorating effect of wrong action is seen in regard to that fundamental point of the mental constitution which makes it a source of happiness to [pg 175] be the cause of happiness to others. It is a universal fact that the tendency of disagreeable emotions is to lead to the infliction of pain on others. This propensity to inflict pain on whoever is the cause of pain, when regulated by the rules of rectitude, is the source of justice in the family and state, and leads only to good. But when it is indulged and unregulated, it is the most fearful feature in our mental constitution. The records of history exhibit many monsters of our race, whose mental constitution has become so disordered by habits of fatal indulgence, that all love of happiness-making for others seems destroyed, and the baleful pleasure of tormenting becomes a ruling passion.

Another feature of our mental conformation which directly bears on this subject, is the fact, that all those good qualities and benevolent acts which naturally tend to please and awaken the desire of good to others, may become sources of pain and ill-will. This is the case when the lovely and benevolent traits of other minds are contrasted with opposite traits in self. Thus it is that the selfish, cruel and malignant hate and are powerfully repelled from the generous, just and virtuous, while the good as instinctively fly from the wicked.

The natural result of these features in the nature of mind, is a continual tendency toward a separation of the good and the bad, the righteous and the wicked.

According to the teachings of experience, a mind that forms habits of selfishness and sin is constantly tending to a deterioration of its nature in all directions. And the course of obedience to the grand law of self-sacrifice for the best good of all, becomes more [pg 176] and more difficult and improbable. As the natural result the good are more and more attracted toward each other, and the bad are more and more repelled.

These tendencies, so plainly exhibited here, reasoning from experience, we infer are to continue after death, until the final result must be the entire exclusion of the evil from the good, whenever power exists to compel the separation. This power, all must feel is held and will be exercised by the Author of all minds, whose great plan, so far as reason teaches, can be carried to perfection only by such a consummation.

One point in the history of our race has a mournful pertinence to this question. We find that the improvement and the safety of the great commonwealth is always, more or less, promoted by the ruin of individuals. Multitudes are deterred from evil courses by the miserable end of those who pursue them; so that the good are often preserved by the destruction of the bad.

So, too, we find exhibitions of the fact that minds are utterly ruined, and ruined for ever, so far as we can perceive. The man who has stultified his intellect, ruined his health, seared his conscience, and blunted all his generous and benevolent sensibilities by a course of debauchery, cruelty and crime, is a wreck as total and irretrievable, so far as we can see, as a watch whose springs and pivots are crushed beneath the hammer, or a human body whose every lineament is effaced beneath the rushing locomotive train.

The common language of life expresses such mental facts in precisely the same terms as are applied to physical catastrophes. Thus, a man who is given [pg 177] up to debauchery, intemperance and crime, is said to be a “total wreck”—“entirely destroyed,”—“utterly ruined.”

Add to this the teaching of experience, that when men are bad, the increase of blessings only increases indulgence and crime. At the same time punishment does not tend to reformation. The more men suffer for their folly and guilt, the more hardened they become. The victims of licentiousness and intemperance, though they suffer such miseries, have ever been regarded as the farthest removed from the probabilities of reformation.