"There is a real sin in being as bad as your society; but it is not the same sin as that of being deliberately worse than your society."

Men can confess separately and privately or generally and publicly. But no ordinary men ought to be asked to confess separately and publicly. It is very hard for a private man to make a public admission. Jones, Brown, and Robinson can all say in church, with complete sincerity, that they are miserable sinners. They are. They know it. But it is quite another matter to ask Jones to say all by himself (his fine tenor voice ringing in the rafters) that he is a miserable sinner, while Brown and Robinson sit grinning at him. This principle may seem a mere piece of selfishness and vanity; yet, in truth, it rests on a very fair basis. To say that Jones has put sand in the sugar without mentioning that in the whole of that Empire or civilization there is no sugar without sand, is an unfair way of stating the case of Jones. It is true, but it is, in the strictest sense, a lie. It is as if we heard a man accused of being short one leg, and then only discovered long afterwards that the accuser was a centipede. There is a real sin in being as bad as your society; but it is not the same sin as that of being deliberately worse than your society. If Jones is convicted of a crime he has no claim to be excused of it; but he has a claim to a bare statement touching whether his crime is as common as being cross or as rare as boiling one's mother in oil.

-March 14, 1908, Illustrated London News