A Christmas Sermon E-Book

Robert Louis Stevenson

• Herausgeber: Cheapest Books
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 16

Beschreibung

A Christmas Sermon by Robert Louis Stevenson written while he convalesced from a lung ailment at Lake Sarnac in the winter of 1887. In the short text he meditates on the questions of death, morality and man's main task in life which he concludes is "To be honest, to be kind to earn a little and to spend a little less, to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence." The piece was to be published in Scribner's magazine the following December."The idealism of serious people in this age of ours is of a noble character. It never seems to them that they have served enough; they have a fine impatience of their virtues. It were perhaps more modest to be singly thankful that we are no worse. It is not only our enemies, those desperate charactersit is we ourselves who know not what we do;thence springs the glimmering hope that perhaps we do better than we think: that to scramble through this random business with hands reasonably clean, to have played the part of a man or woman with some reasonable fulness, to have often resisted the diabolic, and at the end to be still resisting it, is for the poor human soldier to have done right well. To ask to see some fruit of our endeavour is but a transcendental way of serving for reward; and what we take to be contempt of self is only greed of hire.""And again if we require so much of ourselves, shall we not require much of others? If we do not genially judge our own deficiencies, is it not to be feared we shall be even stern to the trespasses of others? And he who (looking back upon his own life) can see no more than that he has been unconscionably long a-dying, will he not be tempted to think his neighbour unconscionably long of getting hanged? It is probable that nearly all who think of conduct at all, think of it too much; it is certain we all think too much of sin. We are not damned for doing wrong, but for not doing right; Christ would never hear of negative morality; thou shalt was ever his word, with which he superseded thou shalt not. To make our idea of morality centre on forbidden acts is to defile the imagination and to introduce into our judgments of our fellow-men a secret element of gusto. If a thing is wrong for us, we should not dwell upon the thought of it; or we shall soon dwell upon it with inverted pleasure."

Leseprobe

A Christmas Sermon

By

Robert Louis Stevenson

ILLUSTRATED &

PUBLISHED BY

e-KİTAP PROJESİ & CHEAPEST BOOKS

www.cheapestboooks.com

www.facebook.com/EKitapProjesi

Copyright, 2019 by e-Kitap Projesi

Istanbul

E-ISBN: 978-605-7748-97-3

© Allrightsreserved. No part of thisbookshell be reproducedortransmitted in any form orbyanymeans, electronicormechanical, includingphotocopy, recordingorbyanyinformationorretrievalsystem, withoutwrittenpermission form thepublisher.

Table of Contents

About Author

I.

II.

III.

IV.

About Author

Robert Louis Stevenson (November 13, 1850–December 3, 1894), was a Scottish novelist, poet, and travel writer, and a leading representative of Neo-romanticism in English literature. He was the man who "seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his pen, like a man playing spillikins", as G. K. Chesterton put it. He was also greatly admired by many authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling and Vladimir Nabokov. Most modernist writers dismissed him, however, because he was popular and did not write within their narrow definition of literature. It is only recently that critics have begun to look beyond Stevenson's popularity and allow him a place in the canon.

Other Books of Stevenson:

·Treasure Island (1883)

·Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)

·Kidnapped (1886)

·The Black Arrow (1884)

·The New Arabian Nights (1882)

·Essays in the Art of Writing (1905)

·The Master of Ballantrae (1889)

·The Silverado Squatters (1883)

I.