Isaiah 5:20

Opposing adherence to peace, we have the spirit of malice and cruelty, of hatred and anger, and these two lead to complete perversion: the malicious man turns every good into evil, while the angry man turns every evil into good and considers good the actual …

Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil,.... That call evil actions good, and good actions evil; that excuse the one, and reproach the other; or that call evil men good, and good men evil; to which the Targum agrees.

To them - That take away the difference between good and evil; that justify wicked men and things, and condemn piety, or righteous persons.

Note, (1.) Virtue and piety are good, for they are light and sweet, they are pleasant and right; but sin and wickedness are evil; they are darkness, all the fruit of ignorance and mistake, and will be bitterness in the latter end.

Fourth Woe--against those who confound the distinctions of right and wrong (compare Ro 1:28), "reprobate," Greek, "undiscriminating: the moral perception darkened." bitter . . . sweet--sin is bitter (Jer 2:19; Heb 12:15); though it seem sweet for a time (Pr 9:17, 18). Religion is sweet (Ps 119:103).

Wo unto them that call evil good ... - This is the fourth class of sins denounced. The sin which is reprobated here is that of “perverting and confounding” things, especially the distinctions of morality and religion. They prefer erroneous and fake doctrines to the true; they prefer an evil to an upright course of conduct.

As it is, exactly the reverse is true. Papers are permitted to terrify and darken the fancy of the young with innumerable details, but not permitted to state in clean legal language what the thing is about. They are allowed to give any fact about …

A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice. We have had the sophist who defends cruelty, and calls it masculinity. We have had the sophist who defends profligacy, and calls it the liberty of the emotions. We have had the …

The word "modest" will soon become like the word "honourable," which is said to be employed by the Japanese before any word that occurs in a polite sentence, as "Put honourable umbrella in honourable umbrella-stand;" or "condescend to clean honourable boots." We shall read in …

Men always attempt to avoid condemning a thing upon merely moral grounds. If I beat my grandmother to death to-morrow in the middle of Battersea Park, you may be perfectly certain that people will say everything about it except the simple and fairly obvious fact …

Right is right, even if nobody does it. Wrong is wrong, even if everybody is wrong about it.

But every now and then men jump up with the new something or other and say that everything can be had without sacrifice, that bad is good if you are only enlightened, and that there is no real difference between being shaved and not being …

"Do you see that fire?" I asked. "If we had a real fighting democracy, some one would burn you in it; like the devil-worshipper that you are." "Perhaps," he said, in his tired, fair way. "Only what you call evil I call good." …

Now things every bit as wild as this are being received in silence every day. All strokes slip on the smoothness of a polished wall. All blows fall soundless on the softness of a padded cell. For madness is a passive as well as an …

The clue to all this tangle is as simple as it is terrible. If England is an aristocracy, England is dying. If this system IS the country, as some say, the country is stiffening into more than the pomp and paralysis of China. It is …

All injustice begins in the mind. And anomalies accustom the mind to the idea of unreason and untruth. ... When people have got used to unreason they can no longer be startled at injustice. When people have grown familiar with an anomaly, they are prepared …