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    what an entanglement have I to undo ! and this undoing , what a delicate , difficult , and long affair it is ! Direct attacks upon the evil seldom fail to produce another and often a worse species of evil than that against which one is warring . For instance , —

    yesterday J . said to B . * How greedy of you , B . to take three buns for luncheon / The colour mounted into B . ' s face , and his pained eyes sought the ground . To-day , however , appetite was too strong for him ; but the third bun , instead of being openly

    eaten , was slily carried out of the foom , and greedily devoured in a corner of the garden . This is all very bad . In the first place , there is no harm in liking a bun ; nature has implanted the taste in us . In the second place , deceit is a crime ; why engender it ? Loss of self-esteem is an incalculable evil ; why engender it ? Can you do a greater mischief to a human being than to call that

    crime which is not crime ? Is it not to degrade the being ? Has not this very plan of action brought degradation down upon thousands and thousands of slaves , trembling before their own misguided consciences ? When will men cease to blunder about the f war of the flesh with the spirit / and heed the injunction , * What / have sanctified that call not thou common or unclean . Nothing is bad that is natural ; if anything seem so , it is but because other parts of the nature are undeveloped , so that one

    particular portion stands out in preposterous magnitude . B . is greedy , i . e ., he is very fond of things nice to eat ; so much the better ; he has at least one source of pleasure , and let him enjov

    it so long as he can , but strive , nevertheless , to open out to him means of higher happiness . ' Overcome evil with good ; * i . e ., cultivate the faculties which are deficient in strength until you have brought them all into proportion . Good seems to me but another name for proportion ; and bad , another name for excess or disproportion . There is no such thing as abstract bad ; every thing in

    man s nature is good , and given for wise purposes . Those animal propensities which so often disgust us in children , are the means through which the young being is stimulated to the acts which continue its very existence ; and , so far from lamenting to observe them in the child , let us bless God that he has annexed p leasure to the exercise of all our faculties ; and , as far as in us lies , let us

    endeavour to imitate him by cultivating all the faculties . Nature has done what is needful as far as regards those very important functions which maintain the being in animal existence ; she has annexed to their performance so lively a pleasure , that all w have to do is to attend to the demands of nature , and minister td

    them ; but with regard to those functions which maintain the spiritual existence the case is very different ; the cravings of natufl are less urgent , her directions less audible ; the developement o the mind is so dependent upon the human action upon it , as t < have led to the false belief that the human mind is like a blanl fheet of paper on which any thing may be written , It req uirei

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    552 Memoranda of Observation *

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Aug. 2, 1834, page 552, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2636/page/22/