[15] In the etymological sense, now practically obsolete, of misbeliever.
[16] Perhaps a better version of perhaps the same story is that of the young Dauphin exclaiming to his right reverend preceptor, when some book mentioned a king as having died, “Quoi donc, les rois meurent-ils?” “Quelquefois, monseigneur,” was the reply—ironical, or parasitical, as may be.
[17] John Asgill distinguished himself by maintaining in a treatise now forgotten, that death is no natural necessity, and that to escape it is within the range of the humanly practicable. But Asgill’s biography, like every other, has for a last page the inevitable “And he died.”
[18] That is, “Let thy spirit (goste), not thy appetite, lead thee.” In St. Peter’s words, “Abstain from fleshly lusts.”
[19] St. Augustine, Lyra, Bellarmine, and others, are chargeable with this judgment and sentence.
[20] “Fortunately these things are known to Him, from whom no secrets are hidden; and let us rest in the assurance that His judgments are not as ours.”—Rogers’s Italy.
[21] The friends spoken of were Coleridge and Miss Wordsworth. The scene was the eastern shore of Grasmere. The date of the poem is 1800.
[22] On the “false humility” which shrinks from all censure or reprobation of what is evil, under cover of the text “judge not, that ye be not judged,”—as if it were the intent of that text, not to warn us against rash, presumptuous, and uncharitable judgments, but absolutely to forbid our taking account of the distinction between right and wrong,—see Sir Henry Taylor’s essay on Humility and Independence in his valuable “Notes from Life.” The man of true humility, we are there taught, will come to the task of judgment, on serious occasions, not lightly or unawed, but praying to have “a right judgment in all things;” and whilst exercising that judgment in no spirit of compromise or evasion, he will feel that to judge his brother is a duty and not a privilege; and he will judge him in sorrow, humbled by the contemplation of that fallen nature of which he is himself part and parcel. (See “Notes from Life” (1847), pp. 46, sqq.)
[23] Were we all turned inside out, however, Mr. Trollope elsewhere surmises, some of us might find “our shade of brown to be very dark.”—The Bertrams, chap. xix.
[24] The avoidance of moral estimate, on the other hand, is imputed to an insufficient sense of the duty incumbent on all of us to form determinate estimates of men and actions, if only as bearing on our own conduct in life. (See “W. C. Roscoe’s Essays,” vol. ii., p. 308.)