"The sinner's own fault? So it was.
If every own fault found us out,
Dogged us and hedged us round about,
What comfort should we take because
Not half our due we thus wrung out?
"Clearly his own fault. Yet I think
My fault in part, who did not pray
But lagged and would not lead the way.
I, haply, proved his missing link.
God help us both to mind and pray."
Christina G. Rossetti.
"She had the clear judicial mind which must inevitably see the tragic pitifulness of things. She had thought too much to be able to indulge in the primitive luxury of unqualified condemnation."
In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim,
Mrs. Hodgson Burnett.
"She was one of those lowly women who apply the severity born of their creed to themselves, and spend only the love born of the indwelling Spirit upon their neighbour."
G. MacDonald.
JUNE 28
"It is not even, amongst men, the best and purest who are found to be the severest censors and judges of others. Quickness to detect and expose the weakness and frailties of a fellow-man, harshness in condemning them, mercilessness in punishing them, are not the characteristics which experience would lead us to expect in a very high and noble nature.... To be gentle, pitying, forbearing to the fallen, to be averse to see or hear of human faults and vices, and when it is impossible not to see them to be pained and grieved by them, to be considerate of every extenuating circumstance that will mitigate their culpability, to delight in the detection of some redeeming excellence even in the vilest.... Is not all this the sort of conduct which, as experience teaches us, betokens, not moral apathy or indifference, but the nature which is purest and most elevated beyond all personal sympathy with vice.... If, then, human goodness is the more merciful in proportion as it approaches nearer to perfection ... might we not conclude that when goodness becomes absolutely perfect, just then will mercy reach its climax and become absolutely unlimited?"
Principal Caird.