James Hain Friswell

James Hain Friswell (8 May 1825 – 12 March 1878) was an English essayist and novelist.

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Quotes

——— for instead of believing that pictures of vice must disgust, certain persons seem to think that they must allure; nay, from the false idea that innocence and ignorance are the same, they try to shut away from the young any knowledge of evil, and having "purified" Shakespeare, purify also the Bible, for family reading.
This is a mistake. The Holy Spirit himself has told us, in a truth as mighty as a whirlwind, as unshaken and firm as a chain of mountains, that "the kingdom of God is within us." There is another truth, its parallel, equally valuable, which He has left for man to find out, it is this: the kingdom of the devil is also within us. We cannot be good by pretending not to know evil. When women go mad, the most innocent, the youngest, the most purely educated often utter the most horrid and obscene language; a proof that to them such evil has been known; how acquired, how taught, it is in vain to ask. What the teacher ought to seek is, not to blot out and veil iniquity, since that will always be visible, but to make the heart strong enough to cast out the evil, first into the herd of swine, then into the sea, which shall swallow it for ever.
- Essays on English Writers (London: Sampson Low, Son, and Marston, 1869), ch. xxii, pp. 273–4