The Seven Deadly Sins Classic Reprint

Excerpt from The Seven Deadly Sins The business of literature is the presentation of life, all true literature resolves itself into that. No presentation of life is complete without its sins, and every master of literary art has known it, from the poet King of Israel to Robert Browning. The imagination of the Middle Ages, in many ways more virile and expansive than our own, had a strong grasp of this fact, and realised that it is the sense of fault or error that lies at the root of every forward movement, that there is no real progress unless it is accompanied by a sense of sin. Other terms may be used to describe the dynamic power which has moved societies or individuals from lower ideals to higher, but if we get beyond words to things, we see the sense of the defective character, the unrealised ideal, always and everywhere as the moving force. To the Catholic Church, touched as it often has been and not always to its detriment, with pagan mysticism, the problem of evil was associated with a mystical number; and the succeeding pages are an endeavour to trace the various presentations of the Seven Deadly Sins as they have been given by men of powerful imagination, or profound insight, at different periods in our literary history. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.