All men are born good.

Good morning. Today, I'm sharing an opinion I read in an old book. This piece is written by a retired judge. His name is Henry H. Curran and the title of his written opinion is "All Men Are Born Good". I think we can all learn something from him:

Some men seem so bad they must have been born that way. That is what we are likely to think, every once in a while, about somebody else. I used to think so, but now I know better. I will not give up a man like that. I will not believe that God started any one of us off that way.

All the little children we see around the world—born bad? No, they were born good, some with less intellect, less physique, less power of will than others, but none of them downright bad. The trouble came later, in the home, in the neighborhood, or in some failure of our scratchy civilization.

It took me a little while to find this out. In school, in youth, in early grown-up life, I supposed occasionally that a man who went wrong had always been wrong. Then I became a judge in the criminal courts. There, the defendants taught me better, made me sure, as I am today, that all men are born good.

That may seem strange. On the bench, I had before me every kind of criminal, the biggest sinners and the littlest, the killer, the stick-up robber, the man who hit his wife in a tenement tiff, the gentle girl who had a mania for shoplifting, the old lady who kicked the other old lady's dog, a thousand other kinds of guilt—and I had to sentence many of them, often to jail. It was not a reassuring background for certainty that all men are born good.

And yet I know they are. I had to talk with all these passing strangers, try the doors of their hearts, learn their lives, put myself in their shoes. It is a very hard thing to do.

Can you really know the other fellow's heart, really stand in his shoes? The judge must try.

And now I know, by the trying, by the biology and religion of experience. There is a spark, a God-given spark of good, in each of those defendants.

You who sit up there today in judgment, take your time and search, and you will find it. Try to kindle it into some sort of fire of kindness or courtesy or unselfishness. Often you will fail, more often you will win.

But never give up. For the spark is there. It always was. All men are born good.