It is all very well for mischievous writers to maintain that we cannot
serve God and Mammon. Granted that it is not easy, but nothing that is
worth doing ever is easy. Easy or difficult, possible or impossible, not
only has the thing got to be done, but it is exactly in doing it that the
whole duty of man consists. And when the righteous man turneth away from
his righteousness that he hath committed and doeth that which is neither
quite lawful nor quite right, he will generally be found to have gained
in amiability what he has lost in holiness.
If there are two worlds at all (and that there are I have no doubt) it
stands to reason that we ought to make the best of both of them, and more
particularly of the one with which we are most immediately concerned. It
is as immoral to be too good as to be too anything else. The Christian
morality is just as immoral as any other. It is at once very moral and
very immoral. How often do we not see children ruined through the
virtues, real or supposed, of their parents? Truly he visiteth the
virtues of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth
generation. The most that can be said for virtue is that there is a
considerable balance in its favour, and that it is a good deal better to
be for it than against it; but it lets people in very badly sometimes.
If you wish to understand virtue you must be sub-vicious; for the really
virtuous man, who is fully under grace, will be virtuous unconsciously
and will know nothing about it. Unless a man is out-and-out virtuous he
is sub-vicious.
Virtue is, as it were, the repose of sleep or death. Vice is the
awakening to the knowledge of good and evil—without which there is no
life worthy of the name. Sleep is, in a way, a happier, more peaceful
state than waking and, in a way, death may be said to be better than
life, but it is in a very small way. We feel such talk to be blasphemy
against good life and, whatever we may say in death’s favour, so long as
we do not blow our brains out we show that we do not mean to be taken
seriously. To know good, other than as a heavy sleeper, we must know
vice also. There cannot, as Bacon said, be a “Hold fast that which is
good” without a “Prove all things” going before it. There is no
knowledge of good without a knowledge of evil also, and this is why all
nations have devils as well as gods, and regard them with sneaking
kindness. God without the devil is dead, being alone.