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And through the consideration of these latter later aspects it was that I came at last to those subtler problems of tacit self-deception, of imperfect and unwilling apprehension, of innocently assumed advantages, of wilfully disregarded unfairness; and also to all those other problems of motive, those forgotten questions of why we make others work for us long after our personal needs are satisfied, why men aggrandize and undertake, which gradually have become in my mind the essential problems of human relationship, replacing the crude problems of labor altogether in that position, making them at last only questions of contrivance and management on the way to greater ends.
In all his work which is not meant to be dramatic that is, excluding the damned souls in the Last Judgment, the bust of Brutus, and some keen psychological designs character is sacrificed to a studied ideal of form, so far as the face is concerned. That he did this wilfully, on principle, is certain.
That is to say, the chief object of the devout soul's longings should be the glory of God's revealed character. And the deepest reason for wishing that He would flash forth from His hiding-place in judgments, is because such an apocalypse is the only way by which wilfully blind eyes can be made to see, and wilfully unrighteous hearts can be made to practise righteousness.
It resents dictation, not wilfully nor wantonly, but because it must; and it resents it all the more when it claims to be inspired. If, therefore, the Atonement can only be received by those who are prepared from the threshold to acknowledge the inspiration and the consequent authority of Scripture, it can never be received by modern men at all.
Were it not vain and absurd to muse on supposable new principles in the constitution of the moral system, there is one that we might have been tempted to wish for, namely, that, of all suffering unnecessarily and wilfully inflicted by man on any class of sentient existence, a bitter intimation and participation might be conveyed to him through a mysterious law of nature, enforcing an avenging sympathy in severe proportion to that suffering, on all the men who are really accountable for its being inflicted.
Surely you would not be willing to see me marry a man who scoffs at the very name of religion; who wilfully deceives and trifles with the feelings of all who are sufficiently credulous to trust his hollow professions whose hands are red with the blood of your children! What hope of happiness or peace could you indulge for me, in view of such a union?
The eloquent Shelley, in his notes to Queen Mab, pretty roundly assures us, that "according to comparative anatomy, man resembles frugivorous animals in everything, carnivorous in nothing;" and the famous author of the Anatomy of Melancholy, has quaintly but nervously observed, "As a lamp is choked with over much oil, or a fire with too much wood, so is the natural heat strangled in the body by the superfluous use of flesh; thus men wilfully pervert the good temperature of their bodies, stifle their wits, strangle nature, and degenerate into beasts."
When my uncle spoke like this there was always that dancing, mischievous light in his dark blue eyes, which showed me that this humour of his was a conscious eccentricity, depending, as I believe, upon a natural fastidiousness of taste, but wilfully driven to grotesque lengths for the very reason which made him recommend me also to develop some peculiarity of my own.
They have wilfully set on one side the whole method of ancient religious teaching, and taken as literal history and narrative what was essentially allegorical and symbolical. Perhaps the reason for this may be in the fact that wherever religion decays and ignorance spreads herself, there the symbolical and allegorical is materialized into the historical and literal.
The girl's fingers lay for a moment icy cold within his. Then she turned with a little breath of relief to Vandermere. They walked off together. Rochester signalled with his whip to Saton to wait for a moment. As soon as the other two were out of earshot, he leaned down from his saddle. "My young friend," he said, "it seems to me that you are wilfully disregarding my warning."
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