🚀 go-pugleaf

and impossible to attain it, since all demand
the same thing. It is, then, a manifest injustice which is innate in us, of
which we cannot get rid, and of which we must get rid.

Yet no religion has indicated that this was a sin; or that we were born in
it; or that we were obliged to resist it; or has thought of giving us
remedies for it.

493. The true religion teaches our duties; our weaknesses, pride, and lust;
and the remedies, humility and mortification.

494. The true religion must teach greatness and misery; must lead to the
esteem and contempt of self, to love and to hate.

495. If it is an extraordinary blindness to live without investigating what
we are, it is a terrible one to live an evil life, while believing in God.

496. Experience makes us see an enormous difference between piety and
goodness.

497. Against those who, trusting to the mercy of God, live heedlessly,
without doing good works.--As the two sources of our sins are pride and
sloth, God has revealed to us two of His attributes to cure them, mercy and
justice. The property of justice is to humble pride, however holy may be our
works, et non intres injudicium, etc.; and the property of mercy is to
combat sloth by exhorting to good works, according to that passage: "The
goodness of God leadeth to repentance, and that other of the Ninevites: "Let
us do penance to see if peradventure He will pity us." And thus mercy is so
far from authorising slackness that it is on the contrary the quality which
formally attacks it; so that instead of saying, "If there were no mercy in
God we should have to make every kind of effort afte