'Yes, but the surest means will be to endeavour to fortify him against
temptation, not to remove it out of his way.'
He heard them and, as always at moments of
temptation, he repeated the words, 'Lead us not into
temptation,' and bowing his head and lowering his eyes went past the ambo and in by the north door, avoiding the canons in their cassocks who were just then passing the altar-screen.
"However," I continued, "Miss Brewster is right in contending that
temptation is
temptation whether the man yield or overcome.
Let this man be tried by a
temptation which insidiously calls into action, in his own interests, the savage instincts latent in humanity--the instincts of self-seeking and cruelty which are at the bottom of all crime.
"I warrant his
temptations were less by at least as many runlets of wine as may be borne by two sumpter beasts when thou, red robber, had finished with him," exclaimed Father Claude.
Fortune may tempt men of no very bad dispositions to injustice; but insults proceed only from black and rancorous minds, and have no
temptations to excuse them.
More than once I have tried to picture myself in the position of a boy or man with an honoured and distinguished ancestry which I could trace back through a period of hundreds of years, and who had not only inherited a name, but fortune and a proud family homestead; and yet I have sometimes had the feeling that if I had inherited these, and had been a member of a more popular race, I should have been inclined to yield to the
temptation of depending upon my ancestry and my colour to do that for me which I should do for myself.
"Out of my own experience I know that we, who are the ministers of God's word, are beset by the same
temptations that assail you," he declared.
Who is to decide, when even divines differ between a providence and a
temptation? or who, sitting calmly under his own vine, is to pass a judgment on the doings of a poor, hunted dog, slavishly afraid, slavishly rebellious, like John Nicholson on that particular Sunday?
Well may we hesitate to condemn the frailties of our fellow-creatures, for the one unanswerable reason that we can never feel sure how soon similar
temptations may not lead us to be guilty of the same frailties ourselves.
She tried to translate his
temptation into her own language, and her brain reeled.
I had suffered much from the forced and prolonged view of this spectacle; those sufferings I did not now regret, for their simple recollection acted as a most wholesome antidote to
temptation. They had inscribed on my reason the conviction that unlawful pleasure, trenching on another's rights, is delusive and envenomed pleasure--its hollowness disappoints at the time, its poison cruelly tortures afterwards, its effects deprave for ever.