"We deceive ourselves in another way, namely, by seeking for all manner of excuses and palliations. The strength of the temptation, or the suddenness of it, or the length of it; our own weakness, our natural tendency to that particular sort of sin; our wishes to be better, the excellence of our feelings, the excellence of our desires; the peculiarity of our circumstances, the special disadvantages which make us worse off than others; all these we put before our minds as excuses for having done wrong, and persuade ourselves too often that wrong is not really wrong, and that though the deed was sinful the doer of it was not. I do not mean that these palliations are never worth anything, nor do I mean that in every case the same deed is the same sin. There are no doubt infinite varieties of guilt in what appears outwardly the same deed, and God will distinguish between them and will judge justly. But the habit of mind which leads us to palliate our sins and find good excuses for them, has this dangerous tendency, that it blinds us to the evil of evil. We slip into the delusion that we are better than we seem, that our faults look worse than they are, that inside we have good dispositions, and good desires, and warm feelings, and religious emotions, and that it is only the outside that is marked by those evil stains. This is a delusion and a grievous delusion. You cannot be good and do wrong. You cannot be righteous and do unrighteousness. Granted that you may slip once into a sin which notwithstanding is not really a part of your nature. Still, this cannot happen several times over. Make no mistake. If you do wrong the deed is a real part of your life, and cannot be removed out of it by any fancy of yours that it is on your circumstances, your temptations, your peculiar disadvantages that the blame can be cast, still less by any wishes or emotions or feelings even of the most religious kind."
Bishop Temple.
"The strength of a man's virtue is not to be measured by the efforts he makes under pressure, but by his ordinary conduct."
Pascal.
MAY 27
"We must remember that it is by the mercy of Christ that we are saved from being what we might have been. 'There goes John Bradford, but for the grace of God,' said a good man when he saw a criminal being led to execution. We are too apt to take the credit to ourselves for our circumstances. Imagine that you were born of poor parents out of work in Whitechapel, and had to pick up your living in the docks, or that you were a working girl in Bethnal Green, trying to keep your poor parents or nurse a sick brother out of making match-boxes at 2¼d. a gross, and then thank God you were spared the temptation to a bad life, which they have to undergo. So, again, we must remember that sins of the spirit are quite as bad in the eyes of Christ as sins of the flesh; He never spoke a hard word of the publican and sinner, but He lashed with His scorn the 'Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites.' The sins that we respectable people commit lightly every day, of pride and indolence and indifference to the sufferings of the poor, may be worse in His sight than the most flagrant sins of those who know no better."
Friends of the Master, Bishop Winnington Ingram.
MAY 28