riticism. The energy of many a life is being spent in a campaign
against a certain list of proscribed deeds. Blessed is the
man--according to their beatitudes--who has the largest number of
things he does not do.

But if rightness is abstinence from evil, then a lamp-post must always
be better than a man, for it justly can lay claim to all the negative
virtues. What an easy way of life is this, simply to find out the
things we know other people like to do and to determine that if we only
can leave them undone we are holy in the sight of heaven.

But not only is this a way of folly, it is a way of positive harm, a
way fatal at last to the true life. To do no more than to turn out one
set of devils only is to invite other and worse devils into the heart.
To seek emptiness only is to invite yet more iniquity. An empty heart
is as dangerous as an empty hour.

Emptiness is not holiness, it is idiocy. There cannot be an empty
heart. To take a bad thing away from a man gives an opportunity for a
worse thing to enter unless you simply choke the bad by implanting the
good. Some of the most dangerous people are those who feel pious
because they can say, We never did any harm.

Religion often has come to mean only a multitude of repressive
regulations, apparently a scheme for making others abstain from those
things for which we have no appetite. Little wonder that children feel
only repulsion for a church which seems to take delight in finding
impiety in every natural pleasure; that men turn from a path which,
according to its prospectus, promises nothing but pain, privation, and
emptiness.

We do not object to the pain and privation provided they have their
purpose. But all nature objects to a course of life that maims,
pinches, and restricts without corresponding and compensating
development and liberty somewhere. We fight against every law of life
and court the ways of death so long as we endeavour to develop
character by putting it into bandages, leading strings, and legal
restrictions.

There is evil to be eliminated; there are thousands of things we ought
not to do. But the best way to get rid of the tares is to sow good
wheat in abundance. The way to avoid the things we ought not to do is
to do the things that ought to be done. The empty life is a standing
invitation to temptation; the busy man seldom finds the devil's card
left at his door.

Live the life above the things you would overcome. It neve