For have you not seen (alas, you have too surely seen) men who had
contracted such a habit of falsehood that they could not shake it off--
who had played with their sense of truth so long that they had almost
forgotten what truth meant; men who could not speak without mystery,
concealment, prevarication, half-statements; who were afraid of the plain
truth, not because there was any present prospect of its hurting them,
but simply because it was the plain truth--children of darkness, who,
from long habit, hated the light--and who, though they had been found out
and exposed, could not amend--could not become simple, honest, and
truthful--could not escape from the prison of their own bad habits, and
the net of lies which they had spread round their own path, till they had
paid the uttermost penalty for their deceit?
Look, again, at the case of the uncharitable man, in the habit of forming
harsh and cruel judgments of his neighbours. Then his adversary is the
everlasting law of Love, which will surely at last punish him, by the
most terrible of all punishments--loss of love to man, and therefore to
God.
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