Social Suffering Arising from Selfishness
Matthew 19:19
Honor your father and your mother: and, You shall love your neighbor as yourself.


The same is true of all the schemes of Fourier and Comte, and of all the social reconstructionists that are writing and planning to-day. They vitiate the result that they seek, by leaving out of consideration the prime factor of the mischiefs that they would exterminate. If a man takes a book that is being printed, and attempts to erase in each proof-sheet a misprinted or a blotted word, but does not correct the wrong types in the form, the errors will reproduce themselves just as fast as they are erased. All the forms of suffering in human society have causes that lie in the animal selfishness of the human race; and if you will correct them — except for a moment, as it were, making a temporary correction, others developing in the same way — you must teach men, being born again, how to make themselves the instruments, not of selfishness, but simply of benevolence and selfness. All the efforts which are, in our day, being made to do this by law — as if machinery would ever correct human nature — are ineffectual.

(H. W. Beecher.)



Parallel Verses
KJV: Honour thy father and thy mother: and, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

WEB: 'Honor your father and mother.' And, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'"




Social Evils not Removed by Outward Means
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