Here, you see, there is no
room for the crushing sense of sin. Sin, if anything, is weakness.
Let us rejoice in our strength, whilst we have it. The end of course
will come, but it is a wise man's part not to heed the inevitable.
Let us live whilst it is called to-day; we shall go to sleep with
all the better conscience for having used the hours of daylight."
Maud listened with head bent.
"My own temperament," Waymark went on, "is, I suppose, exceptional,
at all events among men who have an inner life. I never knew what
goes by the name of religious feeling; impulses of devotion, in the
common sense of the phrase, have always been strange to me. I have
known fear at the prospect of death; religious consolation, never.
Sin, above all, has been a word without significance to me. As a
boy, it was so; it is so still, now that I am self-conscious. I have
never been a deep student of philosophy, but the doctrine of
philosophical necessity, the idea of Fate, is with me an instinct. I
know that I could not have acted otherwise than I did in any
juncture of my life; I know that the future is beyond my control. I
shall do this, and avoid that, simply owing to a preponderance of
motives, which I can gauge, but not control.
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