“There are people who will deny this, but there are people who will deny anything. There are some who will say that St. Paul would not have condemned the Falstaff plays, Twelfth Night, The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and almost everything that Shakspeare ever wrote; but there is no arguing against this. ‘Every man,’ said Dr. Johnson, ‘has a right to his own opinion, and every one else has a right to knock him down for it.’ But even granting that generosity and high spirit have made some progress since the days of Christ, allowance must be made for the lapse of two thousand years, during which time it is only reasonable to suppose that an advance would have been made in civilisation—and hence in the direction of clemency and forbearance—whether Christianity had been preached or not, but no one can show that the modern English, if superior to the ancients in these respects, show any greater superiority than may be ascribed justly to centuries of established order and good government.”
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“Again, as to the ideal presented by the character of Christ, about which so much has been written; is it one which would meet with all this admiration if it were presented to us now for the first time? Surely it offers but a peevish view of life and things in comparison with that offered by other highest ideals—the old Roman and Greek ideals, the Italian ideal, and the Shakespearian ideal.”
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“As with the parables so with the Sermon on the Mount—where it is not commonplace it is immoral, and vice versâ; the admiration which is so freely lavished upon the teachings of Jesus Christ turns out to be but of the same kind as that bestowed upon certain modern writers, who have made great reputations by telling people what they perfectly well knew; and were in no particular danger of forgetting. There is, however, this excuse for those who have been carried away with such musical but untruthful sentences as ‘Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted,’ namely, that they have not come to the subject with unbiassed minds. It is one thing to see no merit in a picture, and another to see no merit in a picture when one is told that it is by Raphael; we are few of us able to stand against the prestige of a great name; our self-love is alarmed lest we should be deficient in taste, or, worse still, lest we should be considered to be so; as if it could matter to any right-minded person whether the world considered him to be of good taste or not, in comparison with the keeping of his own soul truthful to itself.
“But if this holds good about things which are purely matters of taste, how much more does it do so concerning those who make a distinct claim upon us for moral approbation or the reverse? Such a claim is most imperatively made by the teaching of Jesus Christ: are we then content to answer in the words of others—words to which we have no title of our own—or shall we strip ourselves of preconceived opinion, and come to the question with minds that are truly candid? Whoever shrinks from this is a liar to his own self, and as such, the worst and most dangerous of liars. He is as one who sits in an impregnable citadel and trembles in a time of peace—so great a coward as not even to feel safe when he is in his own keeping. How loose of soul if he knows that his own keeping is worthless, how aspen-hearted if he fears lest others should find him out and hurt him for communing truthfully with himself!
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“That a man should lie to others if he hopes to gain something considerable—this is reckoned cheating, robbing, fraudulent dealing, or whatever it may be; but it is an intelligible offence in comparison with the allowing oneself to be deceived. So in like manner with being bored. The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore. He who puts up with shoddy pictures, shoddy music, shoddy morality, shoddy society, is more despicable than he who is the prime agent in any of these things. He has less to gain, and probably deceives himself more; so that he commits the greater crime for the less reward. And I say emphatically that the morality which most men profess to hold as a Divine revelation was a shoddy morality, which would neither wash nor wear, but was woven together from a tissue of dreams and blunders, and steeped in blood more virulent than the blood of Nessus.
“Oh! if men would but leave off lying to themselves! If they would but learn the sacredness of their own likes and dislikes, and exercise their moral discrimination, making it clear to themselves what it is that they really love and venerate. There is no such enemy to mankind as moral cowardice. A downright vulgar self-interested and unblushing liar is a higher being than the moral cur whose likes and dislikes are at the beck and call of bullies that stand between him and his own soul; such a creature gives up the most sacred of all his rights for something more unsubstantial than a mess of pottage—a mental serf too abject even to know that he is being wronged. Wretched emasculator of his own reason, whose jejune timidity and want of vitality are thus omnipresent in the most secret chambers of his heart!
“We can forgive a man for almost any falsehood provided we feel that he was under strong temptation and well knew that he was deceiving. He has done wrong—still we can understand it, and he may yet have some useful stuff about him—but what can we feel towards one who for a small motive tells lies even to himself, and does not know that he is lying? What useless rotten fig-wood lumber must not such a thing be made of, and what lies will there not come out of it, falling in every direction upon all who come within its reach. The common self-deceiver of modern society is a more dangerous and contemptible object than almost any ordinary felon, a matter upon which those who do not deceive themselves need no enlightenment.”