Nay, what is Government? Power to enforce moral order. Why then should not a sin against the end be visited as severely as a sin against the means?
Are men, whose vices invade the peace of the domestic hearth, and sunder the sacred ties of life,—or men who court luxury in foreign climes, while evading the payment of their just debts at home; consigning the while industrious tradesmen and their helpless families to ruin;—are men, in short, who are no longer men of honour, to be still misnamed noble men? Is it not the natural tendency of such misnomers to bring nobility into contempt? And is not this an injustice to the truly noble?
Are the vicious to be allowed to sully honours till the honourable cannot wear them?
Nobility would indeed be beautiful were it a guarantee of virtue! titles would indeed be honours, if the men who bore them must be pure! And if the certainty that those titles for ages had existed in that family, were thus an assurance that morality for centuries had not been sinned against in that house, then indeed, would rank be nobility. Let us not be misunderstood: let us not be supposed to mean that men of rank are more likely to offend against the laws of morality than other men; on the contrary, education and circumstances ought to render them less so: we simply assert, that when they do so offend, such offence ought to degrade them from their rank as noble men.
How glorious would be that land that first enacted such a law! how worthy its monarch of that greatest of his titles, "Defender of the Faith!" For what is this faith? Religion! and the author of Religion has defined it thus:
"True religion and undefiled, before God and the Father is this: to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and keep himself unspotted from the world."
CHAPTER IX.
Mrs. Dorothea had been so busy all day, changing her lodgings again, that she had hardly had time to ask Sarah a word about the Salters' dinner-party.
On this occasion, however, we must remark, that she had moved to a furnished house, not to a mere lodging; for she was determined to make an exertion, while the Ardens were in Cheltenham, live how she might the rest of the year, having a great horror of living like a poor relation.