Thus it might be with
Bridget, notwithstanding her great, clear, innocent eyes, and open,
honest ways. If she had grown up to think such doings harmless, she
would have no conscience about it. Conscience is very pliant to
education. It troubles no man for what he is trained to do.
So I felt these stories. I could not find it in my heart to talk to poor
Bridget about it. I could not tell her large-hearted old mother. This
reluctance was entirely involuntary, an instinct. I wish I had felt it
more clearly and obeyed it altogether! There is some fatal cloud of
human circumstance that covers up from our sight our just instinctive
perceptions,--makes us drive them out before the mechanical conclusions
of mere reason; and when our reason, our special human pride, has failed
us, we say in our sorrow, I see now; if I had only trusted my first
impulse!--What is this cloud? Is it original sin? I asked my husband.
He was writing his sermon. He stopped and told me with serious
interest,--"This cloud is that original or inbred sin which we receive
from Adam; obscuring and vitiating the free exercise of the originally
perfect faculties; wilting them down, as it were, from a high native
assimilation to the operative methods of the Divine Mind, to the
painful, creeping, mechanical procedures of the comparing and judging
reason.
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