“An old historian says about the Roman armies that marched through a country, burning and destroying every living thing, They make a solitude, and they call it peace. And so men do with their consciences. They stifle them, sear them, forcibly silence them, somehow or other; and then, when there is a dead stillness in the heart, broken by no voice of either approbation or blame, but doleful, like the unnatural quiet of a deserted city, then they say, It is peace; and then the man’s uncontrolled passions and unbridled desires dwell solitary within the fortress of his own spirit.”
Alexander Maclaren
