“And what’s the inference?”
“That what men call religion is half cant, half the accident of circumstances.”
“Pardon me, you’re out in your conclusion; it only shows that Hazlet was a hypocrite, or at the best a weak, vain, ignorant fellow. The very obtrusiveness and uncharitableness of his religion proved its unreality. Now I could name dozens of men who would see you dead on the floor rather than do as you have taught Hazlet to do—men, in fact, with whom you simply daren’t try the experiment.”
“Daren’t! why not?”
“Why, simply because they breathe such a higher and better atmosphere than either you or I, that you would be abashed by their mere presence.”
“Pooh! I don’t believe it,” said Bruce, with an uneasy laugh; “mention any such man.”
“Well, Suton for instance, or Lord De Vayne.”
“Suton is an unpleasant fellow, and I shouldn’t choose to try him, because he’s a bore. But I bet you what you like that I make De Vayne drunk before a month’s over.”
“Done! I bet you twenty pounds you don’t.”
Disgusting that the young, and pure-hearted, and amiable De Vayne should be made the butt of the machinations of such men as Bruce and Brogten! But so it was. So it was; I could not invent facts like these. They never could float across my imagination, or if they did, I should reject them as the monstrous chimeras of a heated brain. I can conceive a man’s private wickedness,—the wickedness which he confines within his own heart, and only brings to bear upon others so far as is demanded by his own fancied interests; I can imagine, too, an open and willing partnership in villainy, where hand joins in hand, and face answereth to face. But that any knowing the plague of their own hearts, should deliberately endeavour to lead others into sin, coolly and deliberately, without even the blinding mist of passion to hide the path which they are treading,—this, if I had not known that it was so, I could not have conceived. The murderer who, atom by atom, continues the slow poisoning of a perishing body for many months, and dies amid the yell of a people’s execration,—in sober earnest, before God, I believe he is less guilty than he who, drop by drop, pours into the soul of another the curdling venom of moral pollution, than he who feeds into full-sized fury the dormant monsters of another’s evil heart. Surely the devil must welcome a human tempter with open arms.