So long have we been trained in this that we are all a good deal more
concerned about the things we ought not to do than about the things we
ought to do. We spend our days nipping off the buds of evil
inclinations, pulling up the weeds of evil habits, wondering how it
happens they multiply so fast, forgetting altogether the wiser plan we
would adopt with weeds and briers in our gardens.

There are many who still think of the pious man as one who succeeds in
accomplishing the largest number of repressions in his life, the ideal
being the colourless life, never doing a thing that is wrong or subject
to criticism. The energy of many a life is being spent in a campaign
against a certain list of proscribed deeds. Blessed is the
man--according to their beatitudes--who has the largest number of
things he does not do.

But if rightness is abstinence from evil, then a lamp-post must always
be better than a man, for it justly can lay claim to all the negative
virtues. What an easy way of life is this, simply to find out the
things we know other people like to do and to determine that if we only
can leave them undone we are holy in the sight of heaven.

But not only is this a way of folly, it is a way of positive harm, a
way fatal at last to the true life. To do no more than to turn out one
set of devils only is to invite other and worse devils into the heart.
To seek emptiness only is to invite yet more iniquity. An empty heart
is as dangerous as an empty hour.

Emptiness is not holiness, it is idiocy. There cannot be an empty
heart. To take a bad thing away from a man gives an opportunity for a
worse thing to enter unless you simply choke the bad by implanting the