Lectures and Miscellanies

eousness consists with — I am very far indeed from saying that it is generally accompanied by — a heart of impenetrable hardness, an intellect of the utmost tenuity, and a life of complete selfishness. I have known distinguished fathers and mothers in our Christian Israel whose presence was like mildew upon flowers, and who sent you away with the feeling of having been defrauded of half your vital electricity. They were fathers that begot nothing but their own vapid arrogance, and mo- thers that suckled nothing more tender than their own strapping self-conceit. For there is nothing humanizing — nothing elevating — in personal devo- tion, after you reach a certain stage of culture in the race. It is well for me when my will is purely sensual or devilish — when it insists upon over- riding everything to compass a momentary grati- fication— when in short I am an infant in culture and manifest the disposition of an infant — then it is well for me to obey the will of a superior. Devotion then is both profitable and honorable. And in the earliest periods of human history accordingly we see it most abounding.