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Updated: May 5, 2025
Scoffers have long pointed with indignation at the Christian doctrine that a child inherits a moral bias from his parents, but nowadays evolutionists carry the law of heredity to an extreme which no hyper-Calvinist ever thought of, and many cavillers at "original sin" have become eloquent in their praises of Buddhism, which handicaps each child with the accumulated demerit of pre-existent beings with whom he had no connection whatever.
Mathematics and demerit set him back in '70 and dropped him out entirely in '71, when father was weeks away across the deserts of Arizona, and they were in lodgings at San Francisco, and poor mother was nearly distraught with grief and anxiety. Brother never came back to them.
As this support was conveyed to them by an unknown hand, they imagined, and so, I doubt not, will the reader, that Mr Allworthy himself was their secret benefactor; who, though he would not openly encourage vice, could yet privately relieve the distresses of the vicious themselves, when these became too exquisite and disproportionate to their demerit.
My wife accordingly came on the following evening, and accosted me thus: "You perceive that I must possess much tenderness to you, after the affront you have offered me: but still I cannot be reconciled till I have punished you according to your demerit, in not washing your hands after eating of the garlic dish."
The commons, in order to express their sense of his demerit, presented an address to the king, desiring he might be excepted out of the intended act of grace. The king promised to comply with their request; and in the meantime forbade the earl to appear at court.
Naseby, becoming engrossed in securing the election of a sound party candidate to Parliament, wrote a flaming letter to the papers. The letter had about every demerit of party letters in general: it was expressed with the energy of a believer; it was personal; it was a little more than half unfair, and about a quarter untrue.
So long as there blends with the sense of my unworthiness any doubt about the free, full, unbroken flow of the divine love to me, my sense of my own unworthiness is disturbed. So long as with the consciousness of demerit there blends that thought which often is used to produce the consciousness, viz., the dread of consequences, the fear of punishment my consciousness of sin is disturbed.
What farther contributes to encrease their solidity, is the interest of our reputation, after the opinion, that a merit or demerit attends justice or injustice, is once firmly established among mankind. There is nothing, which touches us more nearly than our reputation, and nothing on which our reputation more depends than our conduct, with relation to the property of others.
In all nations beyond the limits of Israel the sacrifices of living victims spoke not only of surrender and dependence, but likewise of the consciousness of demerit and evil on the part of the offerers, and were at once a confession of sin, a prayer for pardon, and a propitiation of an offended God.
So much and such complex argumentation may not impossibly be deemed a good deal in excess of what is requisite to establish the conclusion to which it points, and which may be summed up in the following very simple propositions: That, by a person's rights being understood the privilege of having or doing whatever no other person has a right to prevent his having or doing, justice consists of abstinence from conduct that would interfere with that privilege; that justice, therefore, is not dependent on extrinsic sanction, but arises spontaneously from the nature of things, and may almost indeed be said to spring necessarily from the meaning of words; and that its sole merit is exemption from the demerit that would attach to the withholding or withdrawing from any person anything belonging or due to that person.
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