The denial of any satisfaction is cruel except
as it is necessary. Purity, carried to a needless extreme, became
celibacy; the virtue of frugality became the vice of a starvation diet,
producing the emaciated and weakened saints; the unworldliness which
can be in the world but not of it was transformed into the morbidly
lonely and futile isolation of the hermits. These are abnormal and
undesirable perversions of human nature.
(2) A reaction from needless repression is almost inevitable. The
attempt radically to alter and repress human nature is nearly always
disastrous. Most of the ascetics had to pass their days in constant
struggles against their temptations, and many of them recurrently
lapsed into wild orgies of sin, the result of pent-up impulses denied
their natural channels. Morality should be rather directive than
repressive, using all of our energies for wise and noble ends, and
overcoming evil with good. A merely negative morality implies the
continual dwelling of attention upon sin and the continual rebellion
of desire. It keeps the soul in a state of unstable equilibrium, and
defeats its own ends.
R. B. Perry, Moral Economy, chap, II, secs, II, III; chap, III, secs,
II, III, IV. F. Paulsen, System of Ethics, book III, chap. II. S. E.
Mezes, Ethics, chap, X, XI, Dewey and Tufts, Ethics, chap, XVIII, secs.
1, 2, 4; chap, XIX, sees. 1, 2, 4. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy,
chap.
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