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Bentham's confidence in his logic lifts him above any appeal to experience; and he occasionally reminds us of the proof given in Martin Chuzzlewit that the queen must live in the Tower of London. The 'monarch, as he observes, 'is naturally the very worst the most maleficent member of the whole community. Wherever an aristocracy differs from the democracy, their judgment will be erroneous.
The best battle-ship, or racing yacht, or freight steamer, might turn out to be a worse thing for its specific excellence, if the action it facilitated proved on the whole maleficent, and if war or racing or trade could be rightly condemned by a philosopher.
Quite different is the battle for the superfluous for ambition, privilege, inclination, luxury. Never has hunger driven man to such baseness as have envy, avarice, and thirst for pleasure. Egotism grows more maleficent as it becomes more refined. After this, is there any need to ask if we have become better?
Slowly and reluctantly, Julien descended the slope leading to the chateau, and the gloom of the woods entered his heart. Jealousy is a maleficent deity of the harpy tribe; she embitters everything she touches. Ever since the evening that Julien had witnessed the crossing of the brook by Reine and Claudet, a secret poison had run through his veins, and embittered every moment of his life.
"Thus saith the Lord" cried the Christian apostles, and they converted thousands of open-mouthed slaves to a "maleficent superstition." "Thus saith the Lord" cried Mohammed, and the scimitars of Islam flashed from India to Spain. "Thus saith the Lord" cried Joe Smith, and Mormonism springs up in the practical West, with its buried gold tablets of revelation and its retrogressive polygamy.
I did not read anything beyond simple and somewhat unusual curiosity into those questions, I may say.... I talked to him for some considerable time I dare say for more than an hour...." "No signs of idiocy, apparently, during all this?" "I consider it less a case of idiocy than one of possession, maleficent possession," replied Crashaw. He did not see his host's grim smile.
But the use of images for this maleficent purpose was a capital crime; any person caught in the act of burying one of them in the public road would surely have been put to death.
Diodorus tells us about an Ethiopian sect which detested the Sun. A parallel, as usual, is found in Egypt, where Set, or Typhon, is commonly regarded as a maleficent spirit, the enemy of Osiris, the midnight sun. None the less it is certain that under some dynasties Set himself was adored the deity of one creed is the Satan of its opponents.
Or the Ruthenian will make a flute out of a human leg-bone and play upon it; whereupon all persons within hearing are overcome with drowsiness. The Indians of Mexico employed for this maleficent purpose the left fore-arm of a woman who had died in giving birth to her first child; but the arm had to be stolen.
At this stage the progress of the seasons, the birth of vegetation in spring, or its revival after the autumn rains, its glorious fruition in early summer, its decline and death under the maleficent influence either of the scorching sun, or the bitter winter cold, symbolically represented the corresponding stages in the life of this anthropomorphically conceived Being, whose annual progress from birth to death, from death to a renewed life, was celebrated with a solemn ritual of corresponding alternations of rejoicing and lamentation.
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