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Updated: May 23, 2025
Thus readers of his life are drawn more especially either to sorrow for his calamities, or to admiration of this stoutest of all hearts set to nearly the stiffest of all hills, or to casuistical debate on the 'dram of eale' that brought about his own share in causing his misfortunes. Undoubtedly, none of these things ought to escape our attention.
We do not forget how helplessly the age in which he lived was tossed to and fro in all social questions, from casuistical Agnosticism to arbitrary Dogmatism; from extreme Individualism to Communism, from the standpoint of absolute laisser faire to the uttermost reliance on authority.
Perhaps it is uneasy and casuistical morality to shrink from using this incentive, so long as one faithfully puts the higher side of the question before a boy as well. But when one is quite sure that the larger aspect of the case will fall on deaf ears, and that only the lower stimulus will be absorbed, one is apt to hesitate.
Now, however, divines, whose sagacity had been sharpened by the imminent danger in which they stood of being turned out of their livings and prebends to make room for Papists, discovered flaws in the reasoning which had formerly seemed so convincing. The ethical parts of Scripture were not to be construed like Acts of Parliament, or like the casuistical treatises of the schoolmen.
Johnson, who, if any one, has the reputation of being a sturdy moralist, thus speaks: "We talked," says Boswell, "of the casuistical question whether it was allowable at any time to depart from truth." Johnson.
His present most pressing business was to resist the encroachments of the sacerdotal power and to defend the magistracy. The casuistical questions which were fast maddening the public mind seemed of importance to him only as enclosing within them a more vital and practical question of civil government. But the anger of his opponents, secret and open, was rapidly increasing.
Excited by the supposed cold critical mind in Beauchamp, M. Livret painted and painted this lady, tricked her in casuistical niceties, scenes of pomp and boudoir pathos, with many shifting sidelights and a risky word or two, until Renee cried out, 'Spare us the esprit Gaulois, M. Livret! There was much to make him angry with this Englishman.
If I quote such passages as this from my Father's letters to me, it is not that I seek entertainment in a contrast between his earnestness and the casuistical inattention and provoked distractedness of a young man to whom the real world now offered its irritating and stimulating scenes of animal and intellectual life, but to call out sympathy, and perhaps wonder, at the spectacle of so blind a Roman firmness as my Father's spiritual attitude displayed.
At the same time, if ever that continental vice should attack our national character, we have two well-known essays in our ethical and casuistical literature that may with perfect safety be pitted against anything that either France or Italy has produced. Even if they are but a master's irony, let all ambitious men keep Of Cunning and Of Wisdom for a Man's Self under their pillow.
But, like all the casuistical virtues, this position had the rigidity of something created to fit a special case; and the result was a fixity of attitude, which spread benumbingly over her whole nature. She was conscious of the change, yet dared not struggle against it, since to do so was to confess the weakness of her case.
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