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An ordinary boy would have broken into a flood of explanations and palliations, but Owen simply bowed, and said nothing. "He stood there for justice," and he had counted the cost. Strong-minded and clear-headed, he calculated correctly that the momentary dislike of his schoolfellows, with whom he well knew that he never could be popular, would be less unbearable than Barker's villanous insults.
A woman whose life is of the head may be a terrible scourge. She combines the faults of a passionate woman with those of the tender-hearted woman, without having their palliations. She is destitute alike of pity, love, virtue or sex.
Palliations of the bad and disappointments in the good are perpetually obstructing our judgment, by bringing what should decide it too close to that common standard of experience in which our only rule of opinion is charity.
Whosoever opens his heart to God, makes a clean breast of it, and without equivocation or self-deception or the palliations which self-love teaches, says, 'I have played the fool and erred exceedingly, to that man the Psalmist thinks pardon is sure to come. Now remember that the very heart and centre of that Jewish system was an altar, and that on that altar was sacrificed the expiatory victim.
He then sweeps away the flimsy cobwebs of excuses, by the curt repetition of the plain, dreadful terms of Saul's commission, and then flashes out the piercing question, like a sword, 'Wherefore then didst thou not? The reminder of past benefits, and the reiteration of the plain injunctions which have been broken, are the way to cut through the poor palliations which men wrap around their sins.
Excuses and palliations were of no avail, and when the emperor urged that King David had sinned, he was told that as he had imitated David in his sin, he should also imitate him in his repentance; and the doors of the church were closed against him.
From all this I would have you infer, and be assured, that my friendship may be of some use to you. But that I may know what remedies or palliations your case may admit of, it is necessary that you explain it to me, as the sick man does to the doctor, taking my word for it, that I will maintain the strictest secrecy concerning it."
Then in a minor proposition, the special case of the suicide was considered. It was affirmed, or it was denied, that his case fell under some one of the palliations assigned. And then, finally, accordingly to the negative or affirmative shape of this minor proposition, it was argued, in the conclusion, that the suicide was or was not, a murderer.
It was almost with the girl's voice that it seemed to plead with him, to undo in him, effect by effect, the work of his indignant resentment, to set all things in another and fairer light, to give him hopes, to suggest palliations, to protest against injustices.
What an elaborate machinery, it was said, for bringing out the merest self-evident truisms! But just as reasonably it might have been objected, when a mathematician illustrated the process of addition by saying 3+4=7, Behold what pompous nothings! A general rule, or major proposition, was laid down suppose that he who killed any human being, except under the palliations X, Y, Z, was a murderer.
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