of doing it flows only from a strength and greatness of soul conscious of its own force and security, and above all the little temptations of resenting every fruitless attempt to interrupt its happiness. STERNE. If he pay thee to the utmost farthing, thou hast forgiven nothing: it is merchandise, and not forgiveness, to restore him that does as much as you can require. JEREMY TAYLOR. The duty of Christian forgiveness does not require you, nor are you allowed, to look on injustice, or any other fault, with indifference, as if it were nothing wrong at all, merely because it is you that have been wronged. But even where we cannot but censure, in a moral point of view, the conduct of those who have injured us, we should remember that such treatment as may be very fitting for them to receive may be very unfitting for us to give. To cherish, or to gratify, haughty resentment, is a departure from the pattern left us by Him who "endured such contradiction of sinners against Himself," not to be justified by any offence that can be committed against us. And it is this recollection of Him who, faultless Himself, designed to leave us an example of meekness and long-suffering, that is the true principle and motive of Christian forgiveness. We shall best fortify our patience under injuries by remembering how much we ourselves have to be forgiven, and that it was "while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." Let the Christian therefore accustom himself to say of any one who has greatly wronged him, “That man owes me an hundred pence." An old Spanish writer says, "To return evil for good is devilish; to return good for good is human; but to return good for evil is godlike." WHATELY: Annot. on Lord Bacon's Essay, Of Anger. FORMS. A long table, and a square table, or a seat about the walls, seem things of form, but are things of substance: for at a long table a few at the upper end, in effect, sway all the business; but in the other form there is more use of the counsellors' opinions that sit lower. LORD BACON. Those forms are best which have been longest received and authorized in a nation by custom and use. SIR W. TEMPLE. FORTUNE. If a man look sharply and attentively, he shall see Fortune; for though he is blind, yet she is not invisible. LORD BACON : Essay XLI., Of Fortune. Fortune is to be honoured and respected, and it be but for her daughters, Confidence and Reputation; for those two felicity breedeth; the first within a man's self, the latter in others towards him. All wise men, to decline the envy of their own virtues, use to ascribe them to Providence and Fortune; for so they may the better assume them: and, besides, it is greatness in a man to be the care of the higher powers. LORD BACON: Essay XLI., Of Fortune. Whereas they have sacrificed to themselves, they become sacrifices to the inconstancy of fortune, whose wings they thought by their selfwisdom to have pinioned. LORD BACON. Fortune turneth the handle of the bottle, which is easy to be taken hold of; and after the belly, which is hard to grasp. LORD BACON. Fortune is but a synonymous word for nature and necessity. BENTLEY. It is, I confess, the common fate of men of singular gifts of mind, to be destitute of those of fortune, which doth not any way deject the spirit of wiser judgments, who thoroughly understand the justice of this proceeding; and, being enriched with higher donatives, cast a more careless eye on these vulgar parts of felicity. It is a most unjust ambition to desire to engross the mercies of the Almighty, not to be content with the goods of mind, without a possession of those of body or fortune; and it is an error worse than heresy, to adore these complemental and circumstantial pieces of felicity, and undervalue those perfections and essential points of happiness wherein we resemble our Maker. SIR T. BROWNE: Religio Medici, Part I., xviii. Fortune has been considered the guardian divinity of fools; and, on this score, she has been accused of blindness; but it should rather be adduced as a proof of her sagacity, when she helps those who certainly cannot help themselves. COLTON: Lacon. There is some help for all the defects of fortune, for if a man cannot attain to the length of his wishes, he may have his remedy by cutting of them shorter. COWLEY. It is a madness to make Fortune the mistress of events, because in herself she is nothing, but is ruled by prudence. DRYDEN. Why should a reasonable man put it into the power of Fortune to make him miserable, when his ancestors have taken care to release him from her? DRYDEN. Every man is the maker of his own fortune, and must be, in some measure, the trumpet of his fame. DRYDEN. To be thrown upon one's own resources is to be cast in the very lap of fortune; for our faculties then undergo a development, and display an energy, of which they were previously unsusceptible. B. FRANKLIN. The Europeans are themselves blind who describe Fortune without sight. No first-rate beauty ever had finer eyes, or saw more clearly: they who have no other trade but seeking their fortune need never hope to find her; coquet like, she flies from her close pursuers, and at last fixes on the plodding mechanic, who stays at home and minds his business. I am amazed how men can call her blind, when by the company she keeps she seems so very discerning. Wherever you see a gaming-table, be very sure Fortune is not there; when you see a man whose pocket-holes are laced with gold, be satisfied Fortune is not there; wherever you see a beautiful woman good-natured and obliging, be convinced Fortune is never there. In short, she is ever seen accompanying industry, and as often trundling a wheelbarrow as lolling in a coachand-six. GOLDSMITH: Citizen of the World, Letter LXX. Ill fortune never crushed that man whom good BEN JONSON. fortune deceived not. Let Fortune do her worst, whatever she makes us lose, as long as she never makes us lose our honesty and our independency. РОРЕ. Fortune is nothing else but a power imaginary, to which the successes of human actions and endeavours were for their variety ascribed. SIR W. RALEIGH. We are sure to get the better of Fortune if we do but grapple with her. SENECA. Many have been ruined by their fortunes; many have escaped ruin by the want of fortune. To obtain it, the great have become little, and the little, great. ZIMMERMANN. FOX, CHARLES JAMES. But he has put to hazard his ease, his security, his interest, his power, even his darling popularity, for the benefit of a people whom he has never seen. This is the road that all heroes have trod before him. He is traduced and abused for his supposed motives. He will remember that obloquy is a necessary ingredient in the composition of all true glory: he will remember that it was not only in the Roman customs, but it is in the nature and constitution of things, that calumny and abuse are essential parts of triumph. These thoughts will support a mind which only exists for honour under the burden of temporary reproach. He is doing, indeed, a great good,-such as rarely falls to the lot, and almost as rarely coincides with the desires, of any man. Let him use his time. Let him give the whole length of the reins to his benevolence. He is now on a great eminence, where the eyes of mankind are turned to him. He may live long, he may do much; but here is the summit: he never can exceed what he BURKE: Speech on Mr. Fox's East India Bill, Dec. 1, 1783. does this day. I confess I anticipate with joy the reward of those whose whole consequence, power, and authority exist only for the benefit of mankind; The worst inconvenience of a small fortune is and I carry my mind to all the people, and all that it will not admit of inadvertency. SHENSTONE. It is a lamentable thing that every man is full of complaints and constantly uttering sentences against the fickleness of Fortune, when people generally bring upon themselves all the calamities they fall into, and are constantly heaping up matter for their own sorrow and disappointment. That which produces the greatest part of the delusions of mankind is a false hope which people indulge with so sanguine a flattery to themselves, that their hearts are bent upon fantastical advantages which they have no reason to believe should ever have arrived to them. By this unjust measure of calculating their happiness, they often mourn with real affliction for imaginary losses. SIR R. STEELE: Spectator, No. 282. The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable; the happy impute all their success to prudence or merit. SWIFT. We ourselves make our fortunes good or bad; and when God lets loose a tyrant upon us, or a sickness, if we fear to die, or know not to be patient, the calamity sits heavy upon us. JEREMY TAYLOR. the names and descriptions, that, relieved by this bill, will bless the labours of this Parliament, and the confidence which the best House of Commons has given to him who the best deserves it. The little cavils of party will not be heard where freedom and happiness will be felt. There is not a tongue, a nation, or religion in India which will not bless the presiding care and manly beneficence of this House, and of him who proposes to you this great work. Your names will never be separated before the throne of the Divine Goodness, in whatever language, or with whatever rites, pardon is asked for sin, and reward for those who imitate the Godhead in His universal bounty to His creatures. These honours you deserve, and they will surely be paid, when all the jargon of influence and party and patronage are swept into oblivion. I have spoken what I think, and what I feel, of the mover of this bill. An honourable friend of mine, speaking of his merits, was charged with having made a studied panegyric. I don't know what his was. Mine, I am sure, is a studied panegyric, the fruit of much meditation, the result of the observation of near twenty For my own part, I am happy that I have lived to see this day; I feel myself overpaid for the labours of eighteen years, when at years. this late period I am able to take my share, by one humble vote, in destroying a tyranny that exists to the disgrace of this nation and the destruction of so large a part of the human species. BURKE: Speech on Mr. Fox's East India Bill. As far as mere diction was concerned, indeed, Mr. Fox did his best to avoid those faults which the habit of public speaking is likely to generate. He was so nervously apprehensive of sliding into some colloquial incorrectness, of debasing his style by a mixture of Parliamentary slang, that he ran into the opposite error, and purified his vocabulary with a scrupulosity unknown to any purist. "Ciceronem Allobroga dixit." He would not allow Addison, Bolingbroke, or Middleton to be a sufficient authority for an expression. He declared that he would use no word which was not to be found in Dryden. In any other person we should have called this solicitude mere foppery; and, in spite of all our admiration for Mr. Fox, we cannot but think that his extreme attention to the petty niceties of language was hardly worthy of so manly and so capacious an understanding. LORD MACAULAY: Sir James Mackintosh's History of the While Mr. Fox winnowed and sifted his phraseology with a care which seems hardly consistent with the simplicity and elevation of his mind, and of which the effect really was to debase and enfeeble his style, he was little on his guard against those more serious improprieties of manner into which a great orator who undertakes to write history is in danger of falling. There is about the whole book a vehement, contentious, replying manner. Almost every argument is put in the form of an interrogation, an ejaculation, or a sarcasm. The writer seems to be addressing himself to some imaginary audience, to be tearing in pieces a defence of the Stuarts which has just been pronounced by an imaginary Tory. LORD MACAULAY: Sir James Mackintosh's History of the Revolution. a master of his art at the expense of his audi- William Pitt: Encyc. Brit., 8th edit., The effect of oratory will always to a great extent depend on the character of the orator. There perhaps were never two speakers whose eloquence had more of what may be called the race, more of the flavour imparted by moral qualities, than Fox and Pitt. The speeches of Fox owe a great part of their charm to that warmth and softness of heart, that sympathy with human suffering, that admiration for everything great and beautiful, and that hatred of cruelty and injustice, which interest and delight us even in the most defective reports. No person, on the other hand, could hear Pitt without perceiving him to be a man of high, intrepid, and commanding spirit, proudly conscious of his own rectitude and of his own intellectual superiority, incapable of the low vices of fear and envy, but too prone to feel and to show disdain. Pride, indeed, pervaded the whole man, was written in the harsh, rigid lines of his walked, in which he sate, in which he stood, face, was marked by the way in which he and, above all, in which he bowed. Such pride, fidently be affirmed that there cannot be found of course, inflicted many wounds. It may conin all the ten thousand invectives written again-t Fox a word indicating that his demeanour had ever made a single personal enemy. On the other hand, several men of note who had been partial to Pitt, and who to the last continued to approve his public conduct and to support his well, and Mathias, were so much irritated by administration, Cumberland, for example, Bosthey complained in print of their wrongs. the contempt with which he treated them that his pride, though it made him bitterly disliked by individuals, inspired the great body of his followers in Parliament and throughout the country with respect and confidence. They took him at his own valuation. But LORD MACAULAY: William Pitt: Encyc. Brit., 8th edit., Jan. 1859. FRANCE. Yet he [Pitt] was not a great debater. That he should not have been so when first he entered the House of Commons is not strange. Scarcely any person has ever become so without long practice and many failures. It was by slow degrees, as Burke said, that the late Mr. Fox became the most brilliant and powerful debater that ever lived. Mr. Fox himself attributed his own success to the resolution which he formed when very young, of speaking, Compute your gains; see what is got by those well or ill, at least once every night. During extravagant and presumptuous speculations five whole sessions," he used to say, "I spoke which have taught your leaders to despise all every night but one; and I regret only that I their predecessors, and all their contemporaries, did not speak on that night too." Indeed, with and even to despise themselves, until the mothe exception of Mr. Stanley, whose knowledgement in which they became despicable. By of the science of parliamentary defence resembles an instinct, it would be difficult to name any eminent debater who has not made himself following those false lights, France has bought undisguised calamities at a higher price than any nation has purchased the most unequivocal blessings. France has bought poverty by crime. Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790. All other nations have begun the fabric of a new government, or the reformation of an old, by establishing originally, or by enforcing with greater exactness, some rites or other of religion. All other people have laid the foundations of civil freedom in severer manners and a system of a more austere and masculine morality. France, when she let loose the reins of regal authority, doubled the license of a ferocious dissoluteness in manners, and of an insolent irreligion in opinions and practices, and has extended through all ranks of life, as if she were communicating some privilege or laying open some secluded benefit, all the unhappy corruptions that usually were the disease of wealth and power. This is one of the new principles of equality in France. BURKE: Reflections on the Revolution in France. the very dregs of the populace, that they seemed rather to solicit acceptance than to be a prize contended for. Yet, as it was still impossible for all to possess authority, though none were willing to obey, a general impatience to break the ranks and rush into the foremost ground maddened and infuriated the nation, and overwhelmed law, order, and civilization, with the violence of a torrent. ROBERT HALL: Modern Infidelity (French Revolution of 1789). There is scarcely anything in history so interesting as that great stirring up of the mind of France, that shaking of the foundations of all established opinions, that uprooting of old truth and old error. It was plain that mighty principles were at work, whether for evil or for good. It was plain that a great change in the whole social system was at hand. Fanatics of one kind might anticipate a golden age, in which men should live under the simple dominion of reason, in perfect equality and per fect amity, without property, or marriage, or king, or God. A fanatic of another kind might cling more closely to every old abuse, and might regret the good old days when St. Dominic and Simon de Montfort put down the growing heresies of Provence. A wise man would have seen with regret the excesses into which the reformers were running; but he would have done justice to their genius and to their philan I hear on all hands that a cabal, calling itself philosophic, receives the glory of many of the late proceedings, and that their opinions and systems are the true actuating spirit of the whole of them. I have heard of no party in England, literary or political, at any time, known by such a description. It is not with you com posed of those men, is it, whom the vulgar, inthropy. He would have censured their errors; their blunt, homely style, commonly call Atheists and Infidels? If it be, I admit that we too have had writers of that description, who made some noise in their day. At present they repose in lasting oblivion. Who, born within the last forty years, has read one word of Collins, and Toland, and Tindal, and Chubb, and Morgan, and that whole race who called themselves Freethinkers? Who now reads Bolingbroke? Who ever read him through? Ask the booksellers of London what is become of all these lights of the world. In as few years their few successors will go to the family vault of "all the Capulets." BURKE: Reflections on the Revolution in France. Neither can the natural harshness of the French, or the perpetual ill accent, be ever refined into perfect harmony like the Italian. DRYDEN. Political power, the most seducing object of ambition, never before circulated through so many hands; the prospect of possessing it was never before presented to So many minds. Multitudes who, by their birth and education, and not unfrequently by their talents, seemed destined to perpetual obscurity, were by the alternate rise and fall of parties elevated into distinction, and shared in the functions of government. The short-lived forms of power and office glided with such rapidity through successive ranks of degradation, from the court to but he would have remembered that, as Milton To so conservative a frame of mind had the excesses of the French Revolution brought the most illustrious reformers of that time. And why is one person to be singled out from among millions, and arraigned before posterity as a traitor to his opinions, only because events produced on him the effect which they produced on a whole generation? People who, like Mr. Brothers in the last generation, and Mr. Percival in this, have been favoured with revelations from heaven, may be quite independent of the vulgar sources of knowledge. But such poor creatures as Mackintosh, Dumont, and Bentham had nothing but observation and reason to guide them; and they obeyed the guidance of observation and of reason. How is it in physics? A traveller falls in with a berry which he has never before seen. He tastes it, and finds it sweet and refreshing. He praises it, and resolves to introduce it into his own country. But in a few minutes he is taken violently sick; he is convulsed; he is at the point of death. He of course changes his opinion, pronounces this delicious food a poison, blames his own folly in tasting it, and cautions his friends against it. After a long and violent struggle he recovers, and finds himself much exhausted by his sufferings, but free from some chronic complaints which had been the torment of his life. He then changes his opinion again, and pronounces this fruit a very powerful remedy, which ought to be employed only in extreme cases and with great caution, but which ought not to be absolutely excluded from the Pharmacopoeia. And would it not be the height of absurdity to call such a man fickle and inconsistent, because he had repeatedly altered his judgment? If he had not altered his judgment, would he have been a rational being? It was exactly the same with the French Revolution. That event was a phenomenon in politics. Nothing that had gone before enabled any person to judge with certainty of the course which affairs might take. At first the effect was the reform of great abuses; and honest men rejoiced. Then came commotion, proscription, confiscation, bankruptcy, the assignats, the maximum, civil war, foreign war, revolutionary tribunals, guillotinades, noyades, fusillades. Yet a little while, and a military despotism rose out of the confusion, and menaced the independence of every state in Europe. And yet again a little while, and the old dynasty resumed, followed by a train of emigrants eager to restore the old abuses. We have now, we think, the whole before us. We should therefore be justly accused of levity or insincerity if our language concerning these events were constantly changing. It is our deliberate opinion that the French Revolution, in spite of all its crimes and follies, was a great blessing to man. kind. But it was not only natural, but inevi table, that those who had only seen the first act should be ignorant of the catastrophe, and should be alternately elated and depressed as the plot went on disclosing itself to them. A man who had held exactly the same opinion about the Revolution in 1789, in 1794, in 1804, in 1814, and in 1834, would have been either a divinely inspired prophet or an obstinate fool. LORD MACAULAY: Sir James Mackintosh's History of the As French has more fineness and smoothness at this time, so it had more compass, spirit, and force in Montaigne's age. SIR W. TEMPLE. FREE WILL. The only question in dispute between the advocates of philosophical liberty and the necessarians is this: Whether volition can take place BELSHAM. independently of motive? By giving man a free will he allows man that highest satisfaction and privilege of co-operating to his own felicity. BOYLE. Since, therefore, neither the foreknowledge of God nor the liberty of man can, without a plain contradiction, be denied, it follows unavoidably that the foreknowledge of God must be of such a nature as is not inconsistent with the liberty of man. DR. S. CLARKE, Neither the divine determinations, persuasions or inflections of the understanding or will of rational creatures doth deceive the understanding, pervert the will, or necessitate either to any moral evil. SIR M. HALE. This predetermination of God's own will is so far from being the determining of ours, that it is distinctly the contrary; for supposing God to predetermine that I shall act freely, 'tis certain from thence that my will is free in respect of God, and not predetermined. All theory is against the freedom of the will; all experience for it. DR. S. JOHNSON, It may help put an end to that long-agitated and unreasonable question, Whether man's will be free or no? LOCKE. We run into great difficulties about free created agents, which reason cannot well extricate itself out. LOCKE. ried along with us in our minds, a great part of If the ideas of liberty and volition were carthe difficulties that perplex men's thoughts would be easier resolved. LOCKE. To ask, Whether the will has freedom? is to ask, Whether one power has another? A question too absurd to need an answer. LOCKE. |