National duties, and other sermons and addresses by James Martineau

Author:James Martineau
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Longmans, Green

adoration. In giving the preference therefore to unimpaired virtue over reformed sin, I speak only of the true excellence of a progressive nature, which has all its faculties awake, which pursues a morality, worships in a religion, and aspires to a happiness, possessing the active sympathy of the reason, the imagination, and the heart.

It has been urged that one who has had bitter experience of guilt must have a more intimate knowledge and a more vivid sense of its misery than those who have but witnessed it; that he who emerges from a dark past into the illumination of virtue must enjoy the most intense relish from its peace ; that satiety in guilty pleasures is the surest extinguisher of desire, just as the child ceases to long for an indulgence which is no longer forbidden. Now there is no doubt that the fallen and recovered mind has present to its feelings a contrast of moral experience, a hell and a heaven of memory, which can present no inducement to relapse, and must create a sense of deliverance, a consciousness of happy change, of lighter spirits, of more healthful visions, of better prospects, altogether favourable to continuance in the renovated habits. But in this very feeling there lurks an almost certain danger,—an influence that may unnerve the energies of the recovered will. This perception of misery left behind, this feeling of repose from the strife of ill, these tears of joy as for a captivity reversed, what are they but a form of complacency, an utterance of self-gratulation, a contented comparison of the present with the past? They tend to concentrate the attention upon this delicious retrospect of vanquished evil, to gather together all the moral emotions upon the process of recovery, and by this preoccupation of mind to sink into oblivion the future which should inspire a yet nobler ambition. The. enormity of the guilt from which the once lost being has escaped totally absorbs the impression of present deficiency; the infidelity of conscience which appals him is in time gone by; his sense of shame is historical; his penitence an act of the memory. The present moment is his contrast to all this; it is his point of rest, his recompense, his heaven ; his thoughts travel forward thither, and linger on a spot which seems so fair, and bask beneath its heaven no longer foul with tempest. And in this there is an attitude of feeling the very reverse of the genuine spirit of a great and holy mind. Such an enjoyment of the rewards of virtue, however natural after so recent a rescue from guilt, is premature and treacherous. It inevitably relaxes the forward pressure of the springs of the will which in the soul of genuine moral goodness is irresistibly strong. In a mind which has the true principle of progress, aspiration is never for a moment suppressed in enjoyment, the prospect before it never lost in the attractions of the retrospect, the conceptions of

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