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I owe you no friendship, but, sir, I cherish no malice, either; and against the worst enemy I have on earth I am incapable of perverting an opportunity like this, and inflicting pain, under the pretence of discharging a duty."
That shameful speech reads worse in 1867 than it did in 1850, and still exerts perverting power over timid and unformed minds.
What if the sin which makes the hell hereafter, is, in spite of all its suffering, loved, clung to, even as the sin is which makes the hell now? Nay, what if every gift of God, and every capacity for perverting His gifts, are retained; and if the sinner shall suffer only from that which he himself chooses for ever, and for ever determines to possess?
His majesty, in another audience, was at the pains to recapitulate the sum of all I had spoken; compared the questions he made with the answers I had given; then, taking me into his hands, and stroking me gently, delivered himself in these words, which I shall never forget, nor the manner he spoke them in: "My little friend, Grildrig, you have made a most admirable panegyric upon your country; you have clearly proved that ignorance, idleness, and vice are the proper ingredients for qualifying a legislator; that laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied by those whose interest and abilities lie in perverting, confounding, and eluding them.
This is a perverting of scripture to prove an untruth; for the government of generals, admirals, majors, sheriffs, is neither a Jewish government nor a church government, nor a heathenish government. Neither doth the Apostle speak anything of government in that place.
And he was turning his wife into a copy of himself, perverting her by his extravagant opinions and his promiscuous friendships, so that the little devotee who had been confided to his keeping was now on the high road to every kind of folly. She still went to mass and partook of the holy communion; but she was each day growing more and more familiar with wrong-doing.
There her credulity was preyed upon, and she was tricked into taking this drug, which itself has such marked and perverting effect. But, though she must have been given a great deal of the drug, she did not yield, as many of the sophisticated do. She struggled frantically, futilely. Will and reason were not conquered, though they sat unsteadily on their thrones.
To insist that a man is free only in so far as his actions are unaccountable is to do violence to the meaning of a word in very common use, and to mislead men by perverting it to strange and unwholesome uses. Yet this is done by the "free-willist." He keeps insisting that man is free, and then goes on to maintain that he cannot be free unless he is "free."
It is the offspring of selfishness; perverting the golden rule by flattering stupidity and winking at vice, with the hope of being treated in the same way by the community. It is a bed of flowers, growing over a sepulchre, and drawing its life from the loathsome putrefaction within. Yet, insincere and wrong as are the motives to false politeness, it is, after all, better than vulgarity.
And as the Jews, in the time of Muḥammad, interpreted those verses of the Pentateuch, that referred to His Manifestation, after their own fancy, and refused to be satisfied with His holy utterance, the charge of “perverting” the text was therefore pronounced against them.
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