Recreations of a Recluse

Couverture
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012 - 174 pages
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1870 Excerpt: ... IMPERFECT CRIMINALS. Quam prope ad crimen sine crimine? How nearly may a man approach to guilt, without being guilty? was a favourite topic or vexed question when Casuistry nourished. One of?ir' Hawthorne's Twice-told Tales is concerned-, vith "a venerable gentleman, one Mr. Smith, ''whose silver hair is the bright symbol of a life unstained, except by such spots as are inseparable from human nature, --whose solitude is one night broken, allegorically, by the entrance of Fancy with a show-box, wherein he is made to see himself committing sins which may have been meditated by him, but were never embodied in act. Not a shadow of proof, it seems, could have been adduced, in any earthly court, that he was guilty of the slightest of those sins which were thus made to stare him in the face. "And could such beings of clouded fantasy, so near akin to nothingness, give valid evidence against him at the day of judgment?" Such is the query propounded, such the problem discussed, such the grave question vexed, in the fantasiestiick entitled: Fancy's Show-box: A Morality. For to meditative souls in general, and to curiously speculative Mr. Hawthorne in particular, it is, as he says at starting, a point of vast interest, whether the soul may contract guilty stains, in all thendepth and flagrancy, from deeds which may have been plotted and resolved upon, but which have never come into outward and actual existence. Must the fleshly hand, and visible frame of man, set its seal to the evil designs of the soul, in order to give them their entire validity against the sinner? It is not until the crime is accomplished that guilt-clenches its gripe upon the guilty heart, and claims it for his own. Then, and not before, our author argues, " sin is actually felt and acknowledged, and, ...

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