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It could not affect his purpose; but the sense of right-doing, which sustained him in that, did not make his road otherwise easier. It is, indeed, especially to be noticed that there was not in him that hard, unyielding fibre, upon which care, or neglect, or anxiety, makes little impression.
Cold antecedent immersion had to be thanked; and stringent vacuity; perhaps a spotting ogre-image of her possessor. Some sense of right-doing also, we hope. Dartrey angrily attributed his good conduct to the lowest motives. He went so far as to accuse himself of having forborne to speak of breakfast, from a sort of fascinated respect for the pitch of a situation that he despised and detested.
They had given each other up for lost through strife and suffering, and now had found each other again; each knew how precious the other was. To make each other happy, and prove their affection, was now the aim of their lives, and as they each had proved that they prized honor and right-doing above happiness their union was a true marriage, ennobling and purifying their souls.
Understand me: right-doing will not necessarily help you to make a fortune or achieve some great position. You may not have the special gifts to do either. Such gifts are something not ourselves which we might easily have been without.
Therefore, the will is called that faculty of the soul by which we choose or refuse things. The will is capable of cultivation. By the exercise of your will you can refuse to do wrong things, and thus strengthen your will-power. Men have attained extraordinary heights of morality by the exercise of the will in right-doing and refusing to do wrong.
If he has reasoned justly, his conscience becomes clear; he finds more real motives for right-doing than the religious man, who has no motives but his chimeras, and who never listens to reason. Are not the motives of the incredulous man strong enough to counterbalance his passions? Is he blind enough not to recognize the interests which should restrain him?
Till at the last they who through obedience and right-doing have expiated their wrong, are endowed by the blessed gods with endless honour, to dwell for ever with them and share their banquets, untouched any more with human care and sorrow and pain. The slaying of any living creature, therefore, Empedocles, like Pythagoras, abhorred, for all were kin.
Success, like honesty, has but one degree, and as nothing is worthy to be called life which cannot be affirmed of God, so nothing can be called success which is not the resultant of right-doing. Every advantage which you would try to scheme or sneak or coerce in face of the protest of conscience, has in it its own curse and its certain defeat.
Any desire or scheme to save your own soul; any right-doing for the sake of a reward, either here or hereafter, he would have bluntly called wrong- doing, anti-social and selfish. The one inducement to virtue that he offered was this: By doing right, you lead the world into right-doing.
Those of us who find joy in right-doing, who work because work is useful to our fellows, who live well because in such living we pay our contribution to the world's wealth, leaving earth richer than we found it we need no paltry payment after death for our life's labour, for in that labour is its own 'exceeding great reward." But did any one yearn for immortality, that "not all of me shall die"? "Is it true that Atheism has no immortality?
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