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You only try your hand yourself at a treatise on the rules of morality, and you will see how difficult the work is. What is the definition of a lie? Can you give a better than that it is a sin against justice, as Taylor and Paley consider it? but, if so, how can it be a sin at all, if your neighbour is not injured?
When, therefore, Paley goes on to ask: "How is it possible, under circumstances of such close affinity, and under the operation of equal evidence, to exclude contrivance from the case of the eye, yet to acknowledge the proof of contrivance having been employed, as the plainest and clearest of all propositions, in the case of the telescope?" the answer is sufficiently obvious, namely, that the "evidence" in the two cases is not "equal;" any more than is the existence, say, of the Nile of equal value in point of evidence that it was designed for traffic, as is the existence of the Suez Canal that it was so designed.
In this detachment and dilemma I saw another man in a white wig advancing across this forsaken stretch of lawn; a tall, lean man, who stooped in his long black robes like a stooping eagle. When I thought he would pass me, he stopped before my face, and said, "Dr. Johnson, I think. I am Paley." "Sir," I said, "you used to guide men to the beginnings of Christianity.
Now, does not Mr Sadler see that the very words which he quotes from Paley contain in themselves a refutation of his whole argument? Paley says, indeed, as every man in his senses would say, that in a certain case, which he has specified, the more and the less come into question. But in what case? "When we CANNOT resolve all appearances into the benevolence of design."
Even Paley could give us no better explanation of certain rudimentary anatomical organs, than by suggesting that the creature in whom they were found had been so far constructed before it was decided what its sex should be! We can see that if any real progress in knowledge was to be made, a change of a very radical order had to come. And it did come.
Or is there some ancient vendetta against Paley? Does some secret society of Deists still assassinate any one who adopts the name? I cannot conjecture further about this true tale of mystery; and that for two reasons. First, the story is so true that I have had to put a lie into it. Every word of this narrative is veracious, except the one word Paley.
And that's really all I know." Mr. Lindsey got in his word before Mr. Portlethorpe could speak again. "There are just two questions I should like to ask to which nobody can take exception, I think," he said. "One is I gather that you've invested all the money which Sir Gilbert placed in your hands?" "Yes about all," replied Mr. Paley. "I have a balance a small balance."
Then, leaving these heroic figures and coming to my own contemporaries, I discern little Paley, esteemed a prodigy of parts Paley, who won an Entrance Scholarship while still in knickerbockers; Paley, who ran up the school faster than any boy on record; Paley, who was popularly supposed never to have been turned in a "rep" or to have made a false quantity; Paley, for whom his tutor and the whole magisterial body were never tired of predicting a miraculous success in after life.
Paley continued. "She looked so strong. But people will drink the water. I can never make out why. It seems such a simple thing to tell them to put a bottle of Seltzer water in your bedroom. That's all the precaution I've ever taken, and I've been in every part of the world, I may say Italy a dozen times over. . . . But young people always think they know better, and then they pay the penalty.
She greeted Miss Allan and Rachel. "I was just saying that people are so like their boots," said Miss Allan. Mrs. Paley did not hear. She repeated it more loudly still. Mrs. Paley did not hear. She repeated it a third time. Mrs. Paley heard, but she did not understand.
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