A treatise on comforting afflicted consciences - The Digital Puritan

:xviiiINTRODUCTION.Seneca*, "is to have been guilty. Nor can any crime,though fortune should adorn it with her most lavishbounty, as if protecting and consecrating it, pass byunpunished ; because the punishment of the base andatrocious deed lies in the baseness or atrocity of thedeed itself."" Think not," says Cicero f, " that any one needs theburning torches of the furies to agitate and torment himtheir own hands, their own crimes, their own remembranceof the past , and their terrors for the future, theseare the domestic furies which are ever present to themind of the impious." It is superfluous to state, yetuseful to remember, that these are quotations from theworks of persons who lived before the Christian era,and who, from their being uninfluenced by the truthsof revelation, may be justly regarded as describing thenatural emotions of the human mind. The numerouspassages in which they delineate the pangs of awounded conscience, and the unmixed satisfactionsattending virtue, are among the most celebrated specimensof their eloquence. So much indeed do the ancientsrefer the character of our actions to our internalemotions, that their usual definitions of virtue and ofvice make them to consist in deviation from nature orconformity to it. They also represent the emotionsderived from a good or evil action as arising simplyfrom the nature of the action in itself, and independentlyof any other cause. Our own observation demonstratesthe accuracy of their statements. Instances have beenvery numerous, in which crimes would probably forever have remained unknown to mankind, but the perpetratorsof them, unable to bear the solitary reproaches* Epistle 9/.t Orat. pro Sex, Roscio Araerino, sec. 24.