Repentance and Progress

Repentance is a subject that is sometimes shunned. But repentance is a very practical principle and plays a very important part in human progress. This is so because, in a sense, no man moves forward without repentance. Increasing individual or industrial efficiency is a kind of repentance by abandoning wasteful ways and by following better ways. Applying improved processes in any undertaking is a form of repentance.

The process of growing up and leaving behind childish ways, as increasing wisdom comes, is a kind of repentance. But when an adult reverts to childish ways or persists in unenlightened practices, or when he conducts himself in conflict with conscience or in conflict with the commandments of God, to that extent he proves himself to be unrepentant and therefore unprogressive. The unrepentant person turns his face to the darkness instead of to the light. He follows ways he knows to be full of evil and error-evil if only in the sense that his conduct doesn’t conform to his best knowledge. In other words, when a person knows better than he does, and persists in acting in error, he is unrepentant, and is therefore, also unprogressive.

He who doesn’t repent of breaking the laws of health will pay the price of ill health. The person or the institution that doesn’t repent of spending beyond its means will pay the price of insolvency. Any individual or organization, any nation or people must pay a price for unrepentance-even if it is only the price of holding themselves back from what they might have been. A successful life is a life of constant improvement, a life that seeks earnestly to abandon old errors. In short, repentance is the very essence of progress. and an unrepentant person is an unprogressive person. Even from a purely practical point of view no person can afford to be unrepentant.