Page:Literary studies by Joseph Jacobs.djvu/75

 himself afterwards! Young, if we may believe him, would despise the action as folly, unless it had these motives. Let us hope he was not so bad as he pretended to be! The tides of the divine life in man move under the thickest ice of theory.'

Love does not say, "I ought to love"–it loves. Pity does not say, "It is right to be pitiful"—it pities. Justice does not say, "I am bound to be just"—it feels justly. It is only where moral emotion is comparatively weak that the contemplation of a rule or theory habitually mingles with its action; and in accordance with this, we think experience, both in literature and life, has shown that the minds which are predominantly didactic are deficient in sympathetic emotion. A man who is perpetually thinking in monitory apophthegms, who has an unintermittent flux of rebuke, can have little energy left for simple feeling.'

'The deepest curse of wrong-doing, whether of the foolish or wicked sort, is that its effects are difficult to be undone. I suppose there is hardly anything more to be shuddered at than that part of the history of disease which shows how, when a man injures his constitution by a life of vicious excess, his children and grandchildren inherit diseased bodies and minds, and how the