cannot be deciphered? Shall I not rather
wonder, with infinite and grateful surprise, that in so vast a scheme I
seem to have been able to read, however little, and that that little was
encouraging to faith?

IX. BLAME.--What comes from without and what from within, how much of
conduct proceeds from the spirit or how much from circumstances, what is
the part of choice and what the part of the selection offered, where
personal character begins or where, if anywhere, it escapes at all from
the authority of nature, these are questions of curiosity and eternally
indifferent to right and wrong. Our theory of blame is utterly
sophisticated and untrue to man's experience. We are as much ashamed of
a pimpled face that came to us by natural descent as by one that we have
earned by our excesses, and rightly so; since the two cases, in so much
as they unfit us for the easier sort of pleasing and put an obstacle in
the path of love, are exactly equal in their consequence. We look aside
from the true question. We cannot blame others at all; we can only
punish them; and ourselves we blame indifferently for a deliberate
crime, a thoughtless brusquerie, or an act done without volition in an
ecstasy of madness. We blame ourselves from two considerations: first,
because another has suffered; and second, because, in so far as we have
again done wrong, we can look forward with the less confidence to what
remains of our career. Shall we repent this failure? It is there that
the consciousness of sin most cruelly affects us; it is in view of this
that a man cries out, in exaggeration, that his heart is desperately
wicked and deceitful above all things. We all tacitly subscribe this
judgment: Woe unto him by whom offences shall come! We accept
palliations for our neighbours; we dare not, in sight of our own soul,
accept them for ourselves. We may not be to blame; we may be conscious
of no free will in the matter, of a possession, on the other hand, or
an irresistible tyranny of circumstance,--yet we know, in another sense,
we are to blame for all. Our right to live, to eat, to share in
mankind's pleasures, lies precisely in this: that we must be persuaded
we can on the whole live rather beneficially than hurtfully to others.
Remove this persuasion, and the man has lost his right. That persuasion
is our dearest jewel, to which we must sacrifice the life itself to
which it entitles us. For it is better to be dead than degraded.

X. MARRIAG