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Two people meet on King Archon's porch [near the judicial court]. One is bringing an accusation, and the other seems to be defending himself against a very serious charge. We know the accused man was Socrates, and we know why he was there. Meletus, a young man who wasn't very well known, accused Socrates of corrupting the youth of the city, and of inventing new gods and denying the existence of the old ones. Socrates says that Meletus shows a lot of character in the accusation he makes. He says, 'I guess he must be a wise man, and, since I'm the opposite of a wise man, he's found me out . . . With all of our politicians, it seems to me that he's the only man who begins the right way, by cultivating virtue in our young people.'
But Euthyphro, the other speaker, who has come to bring a suit, doesn't like this explanation. He thinks that Socrates should be brought to court as a Neologian, like he is himself. Socrates thinks that the dangerous thing isn't being considered wise, but trying to impart wisdom to others: 'I have a kindhearted habit of pouring myself out to everybody. I'd even pay someone to listen to me! I'm afraid
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that the Athenians might think I talk too much.' Then the discussion moves on:
Socrates: And what exactly is your suit, Euthyphro? Are you the one bringing the charge, or are you the defendant?
Euthyphro: I'm the one bringing the charge.
Socrates: Who are you bringing the charge against?
Euthyphro: You'll think I'm crazy when I tell you.
Socrates: Why? Does this fugitive have wings?
Euthyphro: No, in fact, he's not very lively at this time of his life.
Socrates: Who is he?
Euthyphro: He's my father.
Socrates: Your father, my friend?
Euthyphro: Yes.
Socrates: And what is he accused of?
Euthyphro: Of murder, Socrates.
Socrates: My goodness, Euthyphro! Common people know so little about the nature of right and truth. A person would have to be extraordinary, and made great strides in acquiring wisdom, to have come to the point where he could make this kind of accusation.
Euthyphro: Yes, Socrates, he must have, indeed.
Socrates: I guess that the person your father murdered must have been one of your relatives. Of course he had to have been. After all, if he had been a stranger, it would never have occurred to you to prosecute your own father.
Euthyphro: Socrates, I'm amused at the way you make a distinction between a person who's a relative, and one who isn't. Surely the sin is the same in either case for a person who knowingly associates with a murderer when the right thing to do is to clear yourself and him by pressing charges against him.
Then the case is explained more clearly. The murdered man 'worked for us as a field laborer on our farm in Naxos.' In a fit of drunken rage, he killed another one of the servants. 'My father tied up his hands and feet and threw him into a hole' to await further inquiry into the case. Meanwhile, the man was neglected and he died. 'And my father and my family are all mad at me for siding with the murderer and prosecuting my
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father. They claim that he didn't kill him, and that even if he did, the dead man was nothing but a murderer and I shouldn't take any notice because a son who prosecutes his own father is unholy. Which only shows, Socrates, how little they know about how the gods feel about piety and impiety.'
Socrates: And what is piety? What is impiety?
Euthyphro: Piety is doing exactly what I'm doing--in other words, piety is prosecuting anyone who's guilty of murder, or sacrilege, or any similar crime, whether it's your father, or mother, or whoever else it might be; it doesn't matter. Not to prosecute them is impiety.
People like Euthyphro are still around today. In fact, Euthyphro is a familiar figure. He's mentioned in every newspaper, talked about over every dinner table, and making disciples in almost every home. We might call him Pro-pigtails or Pro-pease (from the Punch magazine). He might go without a hat, or go around in casual sandals, which are innocent enough in themselves, but he has one thing in common with Euthyphro: Perhaps he's not dragging his father off to court, but he's always the first to ask, 'Do you want to know what piety is? It's doing just what I'm doing,' whether he's criticizing his country or espousing a diet of fruit and nuts. As it happens, he's usually doing both.
We criticize Euthyphro for being narrow, one-sided, unforgiving, unnatural, undutiful. We say he's unreasonable, silly, foolish. But he doesn't even notice us. He says that 'piety means doing what I'm doing, and it's piety because it's pleasing to the gods.' If you're as wily as Socrates, you suggest that you might be a candidate to follow him in order to give you an opportunity to refute the fallacies as he divulges them. But it's no use. 'Maybe another time, Socrates. I'm in a hurry and I need to go.'
We call him a crackpot, yet he gains lots of followers
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because anyone with his confidence brings relief to the hesitancy of most people in general. But he himself can't be convinced of anything. No matter how outrageous his actions are, whether he persecutes others, or considers himself exempt from common law, or delegates what he owes to his country or his people to someone else, or limits himself to petty rules of piety by saying, 'I always wear this,' or 'I only buy my tea at this store,' or 'spend my summers at this place,' (the superiority is inferred in the word 'always'), he has an infallible creed. We, like Socrates, if we can presume to say so, are tolerant of the 'crackpot.' 'He's not such a bad guy,' we say, 'he just has a bee in his bonnet.' When we don't fall into his religion, our vanity is stroked--it's satisfying to feel like we're too smart to fall into his bizarre eccentricities.
What harm is there in him? we ask. Even if he prosecutes his own father, he's doing it with the best intentions. The harm is that such a narrow-minded, unforgiving, unjust person should exists. It's too bad that he's free to propagate his 'pious doctrines.' That's why every foolish little rule that we accept as the 'whole duty of man' makes us less capable of being fair, generous, and respectful in our thinking. We can't be anything more in a situation than our concept of what that situation requires. No matter how likeable he is, a crackpot is not a harmless person. He's bad for himself, and he's bad for other people.
But Euthyphro isn't open to being convicted. His entire mind is full of his own fallacies and wrong reasoning. We won't be able to reach him later, so we need to catch him now [in his childhood], before he becomes a bore. In order to do that, we need to figure out what
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it is within him (and within ourselves, too!) that helps to make him a crackpot.
There's an incident in George Borrow's Lavengro that's enlightening in this area. Preacher Williams went around doing good deeds with his wife Winifred, but he was prone to periods of spiritual despair. They usually affected him on Saturdays because he had to preach the next day. He would cry, 'pechod yspryyd glan,' which is Welsh for 'the sin against the Holy Spirit,' and he would cry out in grief and terror. Lavengro overheard him and asked him to talk about his life story. Apparently, when he was seven years old, he had deliberately and willfully said certain bad words, and he felt that he had committed the unpardonable sin. His sweet wife had always suggested that pride, not bad words, was his sin, but it was Lavengro who made him understand that that was the case. 'You said that after you had said those bad words, you would look at your friends at school with a sort of gloomy superiority. You considered yourself some kind of lone, monstrous being who had committed a sin worse than any of them would ever dare. Are you so sure that your friends weren't looking on you and everyone else with the same feeling of being worse than everyone else? What I mean is, they probably had their own secret sins, and maybe some of them even shared the same sin you felt so miserable about!'
'Are you saying,' said Peter Williams, 'that the unpardonable sin against the Holy Spirit is committed so often?'
'Well,' I said, 'in the way you describe it, it's very common,
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especially among children, since they're the only ones who are likely to commit it.'
And this points out the root of the issue. The desire to be different and exceptional is within all of us, and some people would rather be distinguished for something bad than nothing at all. Pride can be manifested in all sorts of unexpected ways. When it compels us to feel a sense of specialness because of something odd about ourselves, then we're on our way to becoming unbalanced.
What we notice about people like Euthyphro is how strong their convictions are. They may not be conscious of the fact that they're seeking some kind of distinction that way--that never even occurs to them, or to us, either. But the passionate energy that they cling to and spread their trivial item of importance is what characterizes them and differentiates them from prigs [smug, self-righteous prude], although the two have some things in common. They take their own personal conviction to be the absolute truth, just like Euthyphro did. His conviction was so tight in his mind that no stray beam of light could ever shine in. We might not go quite that far, but most of us can blame our failures on the fact that we refuse to be convinced against our convictions. The more passionate we are, the more guilty we'll be if our convictions turn out to be wrong.
That's why it's so important that we make our children understand from an early age that our Reason is a servant of our Will. Reason isn't necessarily an independent authority whose job is to seek truth. That's one of the lessons that even a young child can understand from history--how a good person can convince himself that wrong opinions and deeds are logical and right. It isn't so much that he convinces himself, but his own Reason seems to act independently, and
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brings up convincing arguments that favor the conclusion that he's already accepted, even though he's not consciously aware of it.
Every child should know this bit of knowledge about his own nature if we don't want him to be at the mercy of random chance convictions. If a child understood this, he would see for himself what the object of his education is. Youths would be eager to acquire knowledge once they realized that a wide knowledge of people and events needs to be the foundation for convictions that are fair and just, as well logical.
That's one reason why children should have a broad and generous curriculum. We try to hold them back with a tidy pre-packaged box of pre-assembled opinions, principles and convictions--and then we're shocked when students don't stick to them. But people can only get those kinds of things through the process of working it out for themselves. The only people whose convictions can be trusted are those who have a broad, liberal mind, because their convictions are the fully matured fruit of their knowledge.
But a crackpot (I think it's okay to use the labels of crackpot and prig because nobody totally fits those characters), is someone whose mistake is an error of excess. It isn't always that he doesn't know--the problem is that he lets one single aspect of a topic fill his entire mind. Euthyphro knew about the love and respect owed to parents as well as anyone, but he allowed a single concept--the concept that justice with no regard for persons was pleasing to the gods--to fill his mind exclusively.
Here's how to raise a crackpot: magnify and praise one single good quality or single conviction until there's no room for anything else. We probably won't instill the virtue or the conviction itself, but at least we'll get in the notion that one aspect of truth is the
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whole truth. This kind of mental attitude is the reason why our own opinions and efforts regarding education are so sporadic. First we say that our nation's children should be brought up knowing about nature, then we decide that we need to focus on handicrafts, then we feel like nothing is more important than science, and then we want to emphasize art. Our problem is that we refuse to recognize that knowledge is food for the mind. That's why we go on thinking that all of education can be accomplished through a single subject.
Maybe someday we'll consider Aristotle's notion of the Mean when we plan our lives, not because that's safe and comfortable, but because excess is like injustice and no one should allow himself to be carried away by a single idea. People who put all of their energy into attacking any specific fortress of sin--whether it's drunkenness, impurity, ignorance, or wickedness--necessarily make that the priority of their life, at the expense of other obligations. They're like soldiers in wartime who are exempt from the responsibilities of other citizens. The rest of us consider extreme excess as a weakness. We think of unbalanced characters as being dangerous to society. I would even go so far as to say that when schools zealously focus on a single virtue, such as sobriety or thrift, while neglecting or leaving out other subjects, the nation's character might be damaged. We know how the focus on thriftiness and savings has worked in France. We should include sobriety and thrift, but we should also teach diligence, sincerity, kindness and all the other graces that comprise love and justice, as well as all the habits that encourage intelligence.
I'll say again what I've already so frequently insisted on to the point of becoming a bore: we need to teach children definite, progressively-scheduled lessons in the philosophy of life. You say that all of that is already in the Bible? Yes, it is, but our teaching of the Bible isn't the thorough,
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exhaustive, progressive kind that's needed for a balanced character.
A school curriculum should exemplify the concept of Aristotle's Mean when it comes to subjects and students. The curriculum's success shouldn't depend on extremes like emulation or ambition to motivate the students. We've all seen how the desire to be distinguished that makes a normal person excel in sports or academics can turn a more erratic person into a crackpot. But neither one has been treated fairly. Lots of motives need to be allowed to have some play, and lots of interests should be allowed to be presented if we want a student to be sane, serving, and outgoing. We're all so different. Sometimes we wonder how a fashionable lady makes it through the stress of the London season [?]; we attribute it to excitement that propels her along, and we don't think any more about it. Yet many ladies who aren't the least bit excited by any of the season's events manage to get through the pressure of the season easily and enjoyably. In the same way, a busy man might be overwhelmed by the bewildering number of tasks on his list, while another man feels like the day is 'infinitely long,' and has no problem fitting everything in.
Both children and adults seem to spend half their time being bored. The reason we're bored is that our thoughts wander from the task at hand and we're inattentive. When we do have to brace ourselves for a moment to really pay attention, we're surprised by the invigorating effect. We feel alive, and it's so good to feel alive that we seek out other stimulating and entertaining amusements. And that excitement leaves us more listless than ever because we've only been stimulated, not invigorated. Being bored becomes a habit. Secretly, we can't wait for the end of every occupation or amusement. We're
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ready to try any 'crackpot' idea that might offer distraction and fuller living, even if it doesn't last very long. Maybe by the time we're tired of that interest, something else will turn up.
Maybe our inability to find enough life for our living is one of the 'shoots of eternity' that reminds us that we're 'children with an infinite hope' who are destined for a better place. But that's no excuse to avoid these 'growing pains' by doing anything that will stunt our personal growth. But there is something we can do for our children to prevent them from developing the habit of being bored. Generally, even the best of children only pay attention to about a third of any lesson. The rest of that time, they're at the mercy of random, unpredictable thoughts. By the end of the lesson, they're mentally exhausted--not because the lesson was so grueling, but because of the throng of wandering imaginations that have played with their inattentive minds.
What would happen if we tried to teach the same amount of material in a third of the time, with the kind of interest that attracts focused attention? Then we'd be able to reduce our work time by a third, while still covering more subjects that meet a child's very real need for knowledge in various fields. Instead of being bored, students would discover how delightful knowledge is. Everyone would benefit, because there would be a hope that, instead of closing their books after graduating, every person under the age of ninety would have their days varied and the springs of their lives renewed with periods of definite studying. We'd all be students, blue collar workers as well as people with lots of leisure time. I knew a man who started taking Spanish lesson at ninety years old. We know how Queen Victoria started studying Hindustani when
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she was seventy. All of us know about some valuable work accomplished by senior citizens.
But these various intellectual studies must not have the fleeting and casual attitude that amusements do (and this is why lectures--where someone else is spoon-feeding a person knowledge with no effort from the listener--aren't the best way to learn). Every subject should show some continuation and progress so that we pick up every day from where we left off, and we're assured of covering new material each time. Maybe someday we'll also realize that moral and spiritual progress are worth pursuing, too--not so we can be better than others, but because it's good for all people, and we're human beings.
Many different kinds of knowledge, and lots of it, the habit of studying and learning started early and continued throughout a person's life, some familiarity with the principles of a well-managed moral life, and some knowledge of economics, should help to develop well-managed, balanced people who are able to live without boredom, without a desire to have other people notice them. But if giving bright, impulsive children knowledge, motivation and work can prevent them from turning into erratic adults, what about slower, more narrow-minded people who might be prone to turning into smug prigs with a little bit of culture?
This letter from a boy's teacher to the boy's father talks about what I mean:
'Teachers sometimes complain because they have bad boys in their class. Is it unreasonable to complain that Herbert is a little too good? I've always thought it was difficult to define a prig; most people couldn't define it, but I feel like I'm watching one develop right before my eyes. Such early tendencies need to be dealt with. Do you have any suggestions to give me?
'Herbert does everything well. He's punctual, and on
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the rare occasion that he's late, he always has an excellent reason. He's never in the wrong. He's always busy with something productive, prepares for his tests, does his share of the work when it's his turn, even completes his French exercises, his desk is in order, his notebooks are neat, and he dresses well. Is there anything that he doesn't do right? He excels in nature study, can write passable poetry, and plays baseball decently. 'What are you complaining about?' you'll ask, 'Haven't I sent you a well-behaved, model pupil? Does it matter if he's a little bit conceited?' But he's not exactly conceited. He's also not dutiful. What he does is to show off the virtues he has more of than the other boys--yet the other boys are actually more interesting and more original than this boy, who reminds me of Admiral Crichton. He surrounds himself with an air of righteousness that other mere mortals can hardly breathe in. He's at his most annoying when truly great people are being discussed. There's nothing wrong with being humble, but at those times, he starts acting like Uriah Heep. If I ignore him, he's sullen, stubborn and silent. He's always too busy trying to look good to be helpful to any of the younger boys . . .'
This kind of 'virtue' tends to come from the way a child is raised at home. We don't know how long Herbert had been at school, but the school was probably a small one for young boys. And his parents were most likely the kind of people who were genuinely interested in education and set ideals before their son. It sounds like the boy doesn't have much originality, although he could write 'passable' poetry.
This is truly a young prig in the making. We live in a time when parents and teachers take education very seriously, but we need to remember that this boy
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is probably the result of this kind of zeal. Another similar wave of educational zeal reached England in the 1700's and resulted in 'Mr. Barlow' as a respected role model [inspired by Rousseau's Emile], Maria Edgeworth's Frank from her 1801 book Early Lessons [this book also includes Edgeworth's story of Rosamund and the Purple Jar], and all of the neatly labeled scales of virtues and vices. A child who is less gifted than his siblings might recognize that his parents praise things like doing a good job cleaning a bicycle, and punish his brothers and sisters for being late, messy, or careless. Maybe he's partially aware of how inferior he is to his siblings, so, in order to make up the difference, he works hard to excel in those things that seem important to his parents and are within his reach, and ends up becoming a 'prig.' It's not an easy condition to treat. It's hard to tell someone that their virtues are insufferably boring and nobody cares about them. Snubbing doesn't work because snubbing someone who sees himself as such a good person will awaken a slow of fire of resentment within him that will probably never go out. Maybe education should be treated like religion in family life--something that's done without being talked about. There's a very real danger when material is offered for false ideals. A child with plenty of inborn character will sometimes submit to the yoke of that false ideal, and make jokes about it, not realizing that it's helping to shape his character. But a slower child thinks that he's gaining true merit from these false ideals. He adopts whatever ones come his way and constructs a shell from them to hide in. His virtues become an outward adornment instead of inward growth and maturity. It's hard to even get through to him because there's no depth to his character to be reached. Even a failure that would be the bitter ingredient that helps most people appreciate true success doesn't seem to affect such a person, because he has no accurate standard to measure bad or good. We have to remember that he has as much desire for distinction as anyone else, but since
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his mind is small and limited [she really doesn't like this kind of a person!], he decides to excel at good behavior instead of standing out for being the odd one.
But even this is only a phase in the uneasiness of human nature. It's encouraging to consider that a child's sense of being not good enough might be the root of the problem. That's why, for the sake of the weaker child, we need to be careful that we don't make too much fuss about trivial conventional virtues that are not only necessary, but easy to do. In our reading and talking, head and heart qualities need to be emphasized instead of focusing on little outward behaviors that are only done to impress others. We need to make children understand that things done only to seem good are annoying to other people. Kind deeds and serving others are only good if they're done out of real love. Work and perseverance are only good if they're done out of a real sense of duty. Diligently doing school lessons is only worthwhile if they're done out of a love for knowledge. The problem with dealing with this kind of a child is that we might lose sight of our own ideals, and accept virtues that are done for praise because those virtues make our own lives more convenient.
Hopefully, Herbert will eventually go to a bigger school. Boys won't tolerate the 'I'm better than you' kind of virtues. For them, goodness has to be spontaneous and unconscious, not pre-meditated and deliberate. They can smell a prig from far away, and they have their own ways of removing it from an offending child.
The prig and the crackpot have one thing in common: both of them want to be noticed and distinguished in one way or another. This is a universal desire that's supposed to help feed the mind, just like hunger motivates a person to eat for his physical health. But it's wrong to bring
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children up with an attitude that morals can be adjusted and added onto like darts and hems at an alteration shop. There's more to life than being praised and avoiding criticism, and every child is capable of receiving more from life than that.
The more sincere we are as we look at the problems of education, the more leery we become about any way of dealing with human nature that's too cut-and-dry. Increasingly, we sense that a person is an infinite being, capable of many joys, lofty aspirations, wholehearted effort, heartbreaking distresses, and anxious uneasiness that's as restless as the ocean. The question that's always with us is, How will we ever get the gentle patience we need to deal with children and teenagers? We know that their distresses and anxieties are part of their normal growing pains, but we also know that they're not always able to bear them, so they sometimes find ways to escape their aching that sacrifice their growth.
Isn't there any peace? We've already read how Goethe found an interesting kind of peace that lasted his whole life from his understanding that 'we are His people and the sheep of His pasture,' that he got from studying the first books of the Bible.
I know of a German hang-out that lots of poorer Polish Jews go to; they're probably sent there by other benevolent Polish Jews. They aren't at all phlegmatic--groups of three or four of them will sit and talk for hours at a time, sincere talk that anybody would envy, but, judging from their expressions, talk about impersonal subjects, not like the kind of talk about symptoms and therapies that you hear from other people's conversations. They probably don't adhere to conventional virtues. But the interesting thing about these men is that, whether they're ruddy-complexioned or darker, they have a look of tranquility about them. Their faces remind you of little
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children--simple, interested, untroubled, and carefree with no worry lines. Could it be that, like Goethe, they recognize that they're merely 'sheep of His pasture,' and that they take life as it comes, one day at a time?
This kind of peace comes to all simple, natural people who have faith in God, just as it did for Goethe, because faith is the only thing that exists to that 'science of the proportion of things' that makes it possible for us to have the perspective that we're just part of the general scheme of things, and we're sure to be fed and managed, and there's no reason to make life too strenuous or stressful. We forget that 'My peace shall flow like a river.' God's peace is an active principle, always flowing, always moving, always nourishing, always fertilizing. It's not a passive state, like a quiet creek where we can lay around stagnate if we feel like it.
'My peace I leave unto you' is like a legacy, and it's for children as well as grown-ups. Children are able to make use of this peace when they're very young so that they can live in carefree joy, but we disturb them too soon. We try to make them dependent on their own efforts. We try to make them feel their naughtiness without reminding them of the good that's possible for them. We make them anxious and unhappy so that they cringe when we touch them, and we don't open the free paths to goodness and knowledge for them.
The question of whether children need God's peace in order to make growth possible is an issue with practical implications. If we believe that they have a right to God's peace, and that it can't be given to them as a reward for doing well, or taken away from them for doing wrong, then we'll be less likely to feel like they're under our complete control because we'll recognize that we aren't the ones pasturing their young souls. The kind of mother who micromanages and
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interferes with every hour of her child's day and everything he does because she thinks it's her duty, wouldn't exists anymore. She would understand, with some amusement, why it's often the lazy, self-indulgent mothers who are often blessed with good children. And she'll also leave her children alone--not because she's lazy, but because, as a dutiful mother, she'll understand that. She'll realize that if she gives her children opportunities and plenty of elbow room, they'll be more likely to mature into natural people instead of prigs. But, thankfully for society's sake, children brought up this way tend not to be micro-managing types who intrude into other people's lives and make themselves intolerable in all of their relationships.
Yes, children are deeply grateful to managing parents. Aren't we all lazy enough to appreciate people who control our lives for us? But well-meaning micro-managing people encroach on other people's lives. As humans, it's part of our responsibility to act for ourselves and think for ourselves--and to allow others the same freedom.
The Puritan influence in us compels us to take too much upon ourselves and others--we feel like we have to 'earn' merit, and that others do, too. We assume that feeding in quiet pastures and being led beside still waters are rewards for some specific merit. We don't understand that it's a natural state and condition that can be had by anyone who will claim it. If we recognized this, then we'd be less intrusive in the way we deal with children. We'd make an effort to be quiet and stay in the background, but making sure that our deliberate inactivity is masterly.
Wordsworth summed it up in just a few profoundly insightful lines, and added a noble suggestion. He said that if we're given enough elbow-room and the freedom of opportunity, we have natural abilities within us, and in the normal course of their affairs, they'll correct any mistakes we make. Maybe we'll even come to discover that
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this is part of God's way of forgiving our sins.