Page:Addresses to the German nation.djvu/209

 that they inwardly wished, our own corruption, which they would have abhorred if they had been able to recognize it.

153. This, I say, is the very greatest transgression of which our age is guilty, and this also explains a phenomenon of daily occurrence; that, as a rule, man becomes so much the worse, more selfish, more dead to all good impulses, and more unfit for any good deed, the older he gets and the farther he has gone from the early days of his innocence—days which even yet echo, though faintly, in some intimations of the Good. It also proves that the present generation, if it does not completely isolate its successors, will inevitably leave behind an even more corrupt posterity, and this, again, one still more corrupt. An honoured teacher of the human race says of them with striking truth, that it were better that a millstone were hanged at once about their neck, and they were drowned in the depths of the sea. It is an absurd slander on human nature to say that man is born a sinner. If that were true, how, then, could there ever come to him an idea of sin, which, indeed, is possible only in contrast with what is not sin? His life makes him a sinner, and human life hitherto was usually a progressive development in sinfulness.

154. What has been said shows in a new light the necessity of making preparation without delay for a real education. If only the youths of the future could grow up without any contact with adults and entirely without education, one might always test what the result would be. But even if we only leave them in our society, their education takes place of itself without any wish or will of ours. They educate themselves to us; to be like us, that forces itself upon them as their pattern. They emulate us, even without our requiring this, and desire