Results of Fostered Sin
The strongest bulwark of vice in our world is not iniquitous life
of the abandoned sinner or the degraded outcast; it is that life which
otherwise appears virtuous, honorable, and noble, but in which one sin
is fostered, one vice indulged. To the soul that is struggling in secret
against some giant temptation, trembling upon the very verge of the
precipice, such an example is one of the most powerful enticements
to sin. He who, endowed with high conceptions of life and truth and
honor, does yet willfully transgress one precept of God’s holy law, has
perverted his noble gifts into a lure to sin. Genius, talent, sympathy,
even generous and kindly deeds, may become decoys of Satan to
entice other souls over the precipice of ruin for this life and the life to
come.—
Thoughts From the Mount of Blessing, 94, 95
(1896).
[299]
315