hey give their tithes in
conventional benevolence, forgetting, and hoping to make others forget,
the sources of their wealth in their use of it. How is it that such
men are so unconscious of offense? Simply because they have never
grasped Christ's deliberate statement that sins of temper are much
worse than sins of passion; that cruelty is a worse thing than folly;
that the wrong wrought by squandering the substance in a far country is
more quickly repaired, and more easily forgiven, than the wrong of
hoarding one's substance in the avarice which neglects the poor, or
adding to it by methods which trample the weak and humble in the dust,
as deserving neither pity nor attention.

Yet it needs but a very brief examination of society to prove the truth
of Christ's contention; very little experience of life to discover that
the utmost corruption of the human heart lies in lovelessness. The
spiteful and rancorous temper, always seeking occasions of offense; the
jealous spirit which cannot bear the spectacle of another's joy; the
bitter nagging tongue, darting hither and thither like a serpent's fang
full of poison, and diabolically skilled in wounding; the sour and
grudging disposition, which seems most contented with itself when it
has produced the utmost misery in others; the narrow mind and heart
destitute of magnanimity; the cold and egoistic temperament, which
demands subservience of others and receives their service without
thanks, as though the acknowledgment of gratitude were weakness--these
are common and typical forms of lovelessness, and who can estimate the
sum of suffering they inflict? Their fruit is everywhere the same;
love repressed, children estranged, the home made intolerable. It does
but add to the offense of these unlovely people that in what the world
calls morality they are above reproach, for they instill a hatred of
morality itself by their appropriation of it. Before them love flies
aghast, and the tenderest emotions of the heart fall withered. Could
the annals of human misery be fairly written, it might appear that not
all the lusts and crimes which are daily blazoned to the eye have
wrought such wide-spread misery, have inflicted such general
unhappiness, as these sins of temper, so common in their operation that
they pass almost unrebuked, but so wide-spread in their effects that
their havoc is discovered in every feature of our social life.

THE REVELATIONS OF GRIEF

_THE