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Crabbe intended to ask whether it was safe to desert truth and nature for one's own self-pleasing fancies, even though Virgil had set the example. Johnson's version seems to obscure rather than to make clearer this interpretation.
Often, I remember, she would tell me, that, when the torture was at the worst, she lay thinking of the sufferings of the Saviour, and said to herself that the shooting pains were not so bad as the spikes of the thorns. Christ's sufferings are a rebuke to our softness and self-pleasing. It is not, indeed, wrong to enjoy the comforts and the pleasures of life.
Let the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life have their share in your allegiance. Be half for God, and half for the world. Live partly for the world to come, and partly for this present world. By no means throw overboard religion altogether, but let it have its proper place, let it stand side by side with self-pleasing and worldliness. But what says the Master?
That your self-willed fancies, and self-pleasing passions, had torn you in pieces, and left you inconsistent, dismembered, helpless, purposeless? That, in short, you were below your ideal, just in proportion as you were not a person? 'God knows you speak truth! 'Then must not that ideal of humanity be a person himself? Else how can he be the ideal man? Where is your logic?
Gregory's habit of self-pleasing of acting according to his mood was too deeply seated to permit even the thought of returning the hospitality he hoped to enjoy by a cordial effort on his part to prove himself an agreeable guest.
But the humour itself was too self-pleasing, while it lasted we know how bare we lay ourself in the confession to be abandoned all at once with the grounds of it.
He compared the selfish disgust with which he had cast off the world with the very different spirit of little Fleda's look upon it that morning; the useless, self-pleasing, vain life he was leading, with her wish to be like the beloved disciple, and do something to heal the troubles of those less happy than herself.
Pake indicated to Garth that Ancose Mackey stood before him. "Where is the Bishop?" Garth demanded impatiently. Ancose blandly ignored the question for the present. "How-do-you-do, sir," he said, like a mechanical doll, at the same time politely extending his hand. Garth, shaking it hastily, repeated his question but the young man was not to be hurried over any of his self-pleasing formalities.
When Antonio found himself alone in the laboratory, his mind would be haunted by one of these looks, or smiles, which he had received in passing. He would set it in every possible light, and argue on it with all the self-pleasing, self-teasing logic of a lover. The country around him was enough to awaken that voluptuousness of feeling so favourable to the growth of passion.
Then the soul knows that all the states of self-pleasing visions, openings, ecstasies and raptures, are rather obstacles; that they do not serve this state which is far above them; because the state which has supports, has pain to lose them; yet cannot arrive at this without such loss.
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