Great Throughts Treasury

"Is there no such thing as moral responsibility and social accountability at all? Is every mean or vicious thing that you or I as ordinary individuals do, not sin, but rather as expression of “illness”? Who would seriously hold that a society could long endure which consistently subscribed to this flaccid doctrine?"

"By denying the reality of sin, we have, in effect, lost our way as human beings and how find ourselves groping in the dark for a definition of the meaning of life."

"For several decades we psychologists looked upon the whole matter of sin and moral accountability as a great incubus and acclaimed our liberation from it as epoch making. But at length we have discovered that to be free in this sense, that is, to have the excuse of being sick rather than sinful, is to court the danger of also becoming lost… In becoming amoral, ethically neutral and free, we have cut the very roots of our being, lost our deepest sense of selfhood and identity, and with neurotics, themselves, we find ourselves asking: Who am I, what is my deepest destiny, what does living mean?"

"If I can read the signs of our time aright, one of the great tasks which confronts us in our quest for peace of mind and more meaningful existence is the rediscovery of ethics. For historical reasons... morality and personal responsibility have become unfashionable."