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He washed his hands when he ought to have exerted them. And blood does not come off so easily. He could not abnegate his responsibility and cast it upon others. Public men frequently think they can do so: they say that they bow to the force of public opinion, but wash their hands of the deed.
There is nothing in all philosophy more true than that, as the multiplication-table says, 'two and two makes four; but it is equally veracious and worthy of credit, that if you do not abnegate this system that you work the common rules of your proceedings by if you don't become loyal men, and give up burnin' and murdherin', the solution of it will be found on the gallows.
It was much more subtle and much more disgusting. The Parisianized Jews and the Judaicized Christians who frequented the theater had introduced into it the usual hash of sentiment which is the distinctive feature of a degenerate cosmopolitanism. Those sons who blushed for their fathers set themselves to abnegate their racial conscience: and they succeeded only too well.
Will it not indeed be strange if the author of "Othello" and "Hamlet" is destin'd to live in America, in a generation or two, less as the cunning draughtsman of the passions, and more as putting on record the first full expose and by far the most vivid one, immeasurably ahead of doctrinaires and economists of the political theory and results, or the reason-why and necessity for them which America has come on earth to abnegate and replace?
But for you to abnegate the right and power of resisting circumstances is to abdicate the sovereignty with which God has crowned you. All men are shaped by externals, but the shape which the externals impose upon us is settled by ourselves.
The chapter on human error was opened: "We are all of one family all of us erring children all of us bound to abnegate hatred: by love alone are we saved. Behold the Image of Love the Virgin and Child. Alas! and has it been visible to man these more than eighteen hundred years, and humankind are still blind to it? Are their ways the ways of comfort and blessedness?
He had his play, of course, as boys in all ages have had; but it was play of a rude character with the plough lads, and the almost equally rough sons of farmers, who worked like ploughmen. In those days the strong made no pretence to protect the weak, or to abnegate their natural power.
All honour to those who can abnegate for themselves the personal enjoyment of life, when by such renunciation they contribute worthily to increase the amount of happiness in the world; but he who does it, or professes to do it, for any other purpose, is no more deserving of admiration than the ascetic mounted on his pillar.
He readily forgot the fact that he had himself been the first to initiate them into the rudiments of vice to induce them to abnegate their self-respect, and to brave the opinion of the world and their own reproaches while he could not brook that they should reduce him to a level with one of his own subjects, and that they should so far emancipate themselves as to feel a preference for younger and more attractive men when they had been honoured by his notice.
"Make no rash promise, Madeleine," interrupted Maurice. "My father's wishes and my grandmother's must ever have weight with me; but when I honestly differ from them in opinion, I trust there is no disrespect in my saying so. Blindly to obey their commands would be to abnegate free agency and self-responsibility."
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