In more modern phrase the text reads: (1) People decline to look facts in the face; (2) No state of things exists anywhere but that it has its results as well as its cause.
I. You may read and know, if you will, that as our country advances, as we say, in wealth and the products of wealth, there is something else which is increasing too, and a very strange spectre it is, to be growing as it does under such circumstances. That spectre is poverty. Can we think on this and not know that there is the further question to be asked, "What will ye do m the end thereof?" Whatever might be the various ways in which the economist or politician might describe the working of the phenomena, the evil cause lies farthest back, of course, in our feelings on the subject, and in the thoughts of our hearts; and the selfishness of classes, which have the history of the country for the present in their own hands, is the real root of all.
II. I know not that there have ever been in the world any principles, save those of Christ, which strike at selfishness as the root of all evil in society; and selfishness is a thing that can only be cured from within. No rules can put a stop to it, and unselfishness must be learnt as everything else has to be learnt, by practising by beginning on a small scale, by going on to more difficult exercises; and the grammar of unselfishness is self-discipline and self-denial on a small scale. Any religion or religious sect which tells you not to trouble yourself about self-denial as a real discipline is an instrument of self-deception. It will not promote unselfishness; it will not in the end have any good or large effect upon society; and if churches become leavened into a general feeling that there is no special work for them in this direction, that it is not their business to teach self-discipline to each subject of their influence, the work of that church is nearly over, or at any rate it must make a new beginning.
Archbishop Benson, Boy Life: Sundays in Wellington College,p. 89.
References: Jeremiah 5:31. S. Martin, Westminster Chapel Pulpit,4th series, No. 4; Plain Sermons by Contributors to" Tracts for the Times,vol. x., pp. 258, 266. Jeremiah 6:14 Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. vi., No. 301.