Look at a man, for example, divine in the
possibilities of his being, but through vice, through drink, through
habits of one kind and another, corrupted until it is an insult to a
brute to call him brutal. We do not deny all this. Notice the cruelties
of men towards each other, the jealousies, the envies, the strifes, the
warfares. How one class looks down upon and treats with contempt
another that is a little lower! How masters have used their slaves; how
tyrants like Nero and Caligula have made themselves hideous spectacles
of what is possible to humanity, on a stage that is world-wide and
illuminated by the flash-lights of history!
I do not wish you to suppose for a moment that I belittle, that I
underestimate these evils, only we do not need anything other than the
scientific and historic facts of the world in order to account for
them. What is sin, as science looks at it and treats it? Not something
consciously and purposely developed, not something originating in a
rebellion in some other world than this. It seems to me that we can
very easily account for it when we recognize that man has been
gradually coming up from the lower orders of life, and that he still
has in him the snake and the hyena, the wolf, the tiger, the bear, all
the wild, fierce passions of the animal world only partly sloughed off,
not yet outgrown; when you remember how ignorant he is, how he does not
understand yet the meaning of these divine laws and the divine life,
glimpses of which now and then attract his attention and lure him on;
when you remember that selfishness, misguided by ignorance, can believe
that one man can get something for his behoof and happiness and good at
the expense of the welfare of somebody else, and harm come only to the
person that is defrauded.
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