You think that puts the case too sharply? I tell you, lover of
liberty, there is no choice offered to you, but it is similarly between
life and death. There is no act, nor option of act, possible, but the
wrong deed or option has poison in it which will stay in your veins
thereafter forever. Never more to all eternity can you be as you might
have been had you not done that--chosen that. You have "formed your
character," forsooth! No; if you have chosen ill, you have De-formed
it, and that for ever! In some choices it had been better for you that
a red-hot iron bar struck you aside, scarred and helpless, than that you
had so chosen. "You will know better next time!" No. Next time will
never come. Next time the choice will be in quite another aspect--
between quite different things,--you, weaker than you were by the evil
into which you have fallen; it, more doubtful than it was, by the
increased dimness of your sight. No one ever gets wiser by doing wrong,
nor stronger. You will get wiser and stronger only by doing right,
whether forced or not; the prime, the one need is to do that, under
whatever compulsion, until you can do it without compulsion.
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