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Updated: July 6, 2025
Gwyn, upon his death-bed, to his successor is much to his honour; and they who censure it seem, in their zeal to show themselves strict moralists, to have suffered their notions of vice and virtue to have fallen into strange confusion.
But the good deeds effected by our moral faculties are less capable of transmission; they are of a more private and retiring character: while as the motives to which they owe their origin are generally the result of self-discipline and of self-sacrifice, they have to be worked out by every man for himself; and thus, begun by each anew, they derive little benefit from the maxims of preceding experience, nor can they well be stored up for the use of future moralists.
The tenderest of human hearts, "when lovely woman stooped to folly," found no way of escape for her but to "die;" and those closet moralists, with filthy fancies and soiled souls, who abound in every community, regard her with that sort of scorn which a Turk expresses when he says "Dog of a Christian." Poor Lettice!
THE CODES OF COMMUNITIES: JUSTICE. In view of the existing tendency in the average man, and even in some philosophers, to pass lightly over the diversities exhibited by different codes, it is well to cast a brief preliminary glance at the content of morals as accepted, both by communities of men, and by their more reflective spokesmen, the moralists.
Not at all; my master himself had convinced me that there was no such virtue as gratitude. It was an error of vulgar moralists. I yielded to his arguments, and at length privately espoused his daughter. The day after this took place, he summoned me to his study.
If a man does anything, he does it either because he fears to be punished if he does not do it, or because he hopes to obtain pleasure by doing it, or because he gratifies his affections by doing it. Assuming the position of the absolute moralists, let it be granted that there is a perception of right and wrong innate in every man.
Philosophers, moralists, preachers have united in saying: "Base your life upon a noble feeling, if you are to live aright; base the state upon a generous devotion of its members to some great ideal, if it is to prosper and be strong." All have agreed that the difference of life could only be harmonized by placing action under the stimulus of high unselfish passion.
Many were the anecdotes reported to each other by the spectators of his humanity his charity his benevolence to the poor; and, above all, of his intrepidity and courage; for it may be observed here and we leave moralists, metaphysicians, and political economists to draw whatever inferences they please from the fact but fact it is that in no instance is any man who has violated the law taken up publicly, on Irish ground, whether in town or country, that the people do not uniformly express the warmest sympathy for him, and a strong manifestation of enmity against his captors.
I know, that as a proof of the inferiority of the sex, Rousseau has exultingly exclaimed, How can they leave the nursery for the camp! And the camp has by some moralists been termed the school of the most heroic virtues; though, I think, it would puzzle a keen casuist to prove the reasonableness of the greater number of wars, that have dubbed heroes.
He wished to avoid falling back upon mere disconnected judgments of conscience after the manner of the intuitional moralists. The 'true good' for him seems to mean the attainment, the complete realisation, of the moral ideal. Were this reached we should indeed 'find rest, for moral activity as we know it would be at an end.
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