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"I don't think," said the good lady, "that my husband has ever been so pleased at anything that has befallen him, not even when he was first given office such a distinguished club and so exclusive!" Father Payne laughed loud and shrill. "That's human nature at its nakedest!" he said.
But let us take these passages at their nakedest. Let us ignore as completely as Jesus did that the legal penalty of "eye for eye" had been commuted into a money penalty by the great majority of early Pharisaic lawyers. Is not that very maxim to-day the clamoured policy of Christian multitudes? "Destroy them from under the heavens of the Lord!"
Every man sees him, as Cham saw his father the first of this sin, an uncovered man, and though his garment be on, uncovered; the secretest parts of his soul lying in the nakedest manner visible: all his passions come out now, all his vanities, and those shamefuller humours which discretion clothes.
Men have to return to reality; they cannot live on semblance. The French Revolution, or third act, we may well call the final one; for lower than that savage Sansculottism men cannot go. They stand there on the nakedest haggard Fact, undeniable in all seasons and circumstances; and may and must begin again confidently to build up from that.
'Twas the vilest of them all the nakedest assertion of the monopolist platform: "You live, not for yourself, but wholly and solely for me. I disregard your claims to your own body and soul, and use you as my chattel." That worst form has died. It withered away before the moral indignation even of existing humanity.
We have no need to dwell on the cycle of prophecies concerning the corner-stone, nor on the original application of the psalm. We must be content with remarking that our Lord, in this last portion of His address, throws away even the thin veil of parable, and speaks the sternest truth in the nakedest words.
If it turn out that they will lead us to stultify some past conclusion to which we stand committed, we drop them like hot coals. To Emerson, this behavior appeared the nakedest personal vanity. Recognizing that he was finite, he could not desire to be consistent.
The carols and Catholic poems are of this delightful character, curiously one in feeling with such old folk-carols as are still preserved. One of these compositions rises to a much higher plane by a truly extraordinary felicity of phrase, one of those inspired quaintnesses which move the reader so powerfully as the nakedest pathos or the most ornate grandeur.
The nakedest, savagest reality, I say, is preferable to any semblance, however dignified. Besides, it will clothe itself with due semblance by and by, if it be real. No fear of that; actually no fear at all. Given the living man, there will be found clothes for him; he will find himself clothes.
'I'd give the full of my pockets in goold, if I had it this minit, said Andy, with great emphasis, 'to set me foot on the nakedest sod of bog that's in Ould Ireland this day! an' often I abused it; but throth, the purtiest sight in life to me would be a good pratiefield, an' meself walkin' among the ridges!
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