Today's Maxwell Quote

From this talk:

Strange, in a time otherwise obsessed with entitlements, how little concern there is over our becoming entitled to the blessings of heaven. Instead, a declining belief by some in ultimate immortality has only intensified proximate immorality, “leading away many … telling them that when a man was dead, that was the end thereof” (Alma 30:18). A Japanese thinker, looking at our pleasure-centered Western society, said, almost confrontingly:

‎“If there is nothing beyond death, then what is wrong with giving oneself wholly to pleasure in the short time one has left to live? The loss of faith in the ‘other world’ has saddled modern Western society with a fatal moral problem” (Takeshi Umehara, “The Civilization of the Forest: Ancient Japan Shows Post-modernism the Way,” in At Century’s End, ed. Nathan P. Gardels [1995], 190).

Therefore, being good citizens includes being good, such as in knowing the clear difference between lusting after a neighbor and loving one’s neighbor! Matthew Arnold wisely observed that while “Nature cares nothing [for] chastity, … human nature … cares about it a great deal” (Philistinism in England and America, vol. 10 of The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super [1974], 160). To which I add: divine nature cares infinitely more!