you to have freedom of choice; it
forms your character--your individuality! If you take the wrong cup or
the wrong berry, you will die before the day is over, but you will have
acquired the dignity of a Free child?"

152. You think that puts the case too sharply? I tell you, lover of
liberty, there is no choice offered to you, but it is similarly between
life and death. There is no act, nor option of act, possible, but the
wrong deed or option has poison in it which will stay in your veins
thereafter forever. Never more to all eternity can you be as you might
have been had you not done that--chosen that. You have "formed your
character," forsooth! No; if you have chosen ill, you have De-formed
it, and that for ever! In some choices it had been better for you that
a red-hot iron bar struck you aside, scarred and helpless, than that you
had so chosen. "You will know better next time!" No. Next time will
never come. Next time the choice will be in quite another aspect--
between quite different things,--you, weaker than you were by the evil
into which you have fallen; it, more doubtful than it was, by the
increased dimness of your sight. No one ever gets wiser by doing wrong,
nor stronger. You will get wiser and stronger only by doing right,
whether forced or not; the prime, the one need is to do that, under
whatever compulsion, until you can do it without compulsion. And then
you are a Man.

153. "What!" a wayward youth might perhaps answer, incredulously, "no
one ever gets wiser by doing wrong? Shall I not know the world best by
trying the wrong of it, and repenting? Have I not, even as it is,
learned much by many of my errors?" Indeed, the effort by which
partially you recovered yourself was precious; that part of your thought
by which you discerned the error was precious. What wisdom and strength
you kept, and rightly used, are rewarded; and in the pain and the
repentance, and in the acquaintance with the aspects of folly and sin,
you have learned something; how much less than you would have learned in
right paths can never be told, but that it is less is certain. Your
liberty of choice has simply destroyed for you so much life and strength
never regainable. It is true, you now know the habits of swine, and the
taste of husks; do you think your father could not have taught you to
know better habits and pleasanter tastes, if you had stayed in his house;
and that the knowledge you have lost would n