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What were the moralists doing there? Festivals like this are relics of paganism, and have my cordial approval. We English ought to have learnt by this time that the repression of pleasure is a dangerous error.
The investigations of modern writers have entirely thrown down the scaffolding on which the airy fabric, so delightful to poets and moralists, reposed. The departing Emperor stands no longer in a transparency robed in shining garments. His transfiguration is at an end.
It would be well if our moralists could realise that the chief causes of weakness in the presence of sensual temptation are, on the one hand, boredom and ennui, and on the other hand flabbiness and degeneracy of spiritual fibre, and that the remedy for both these defects is to give the young the type of education which will foster rather than hinder growth.
Perhaps severe moralists might say that we had entered into a bargain with the captain of the Regulus, not to make war on him during the passage; in answer to which, we can reply that we were not attacking him, but the Pictou. Our intention, it must be confessed, however, was to seize the Regulus in the confusion. Had we been better treated as prisoners, our tempers might not have been so savage.
"A good many moralists before and since old Rabelais have discoursed on that text.
That which is over and above bread is to a large extent that which makes life graceful and refined, and I have no wish to preach a crusade against it; but I have just as little hesitation in declaring what it is not left to pulpit moralists to say, that the falsely luxurious style of living among us looks very strange by the side of this petition.
So we cannot wonder when moralists put it forward as the foundation- stone of all morality and seek to build their systems upon it. To a man who has been bred to obey the inner voice, it seems the very source and basis of the right; it is so inescapable, so authoritative, that it cannot be deemed derived, or evolved by a mechanical process of selection.
I have told you it was to save her child's life, and though that class of philosophers and ultra moralists who believe that there are no causes sufficient to justify her act, may declare her guilty of theft, let the promptings of your own hearts decide whether her position did not excuse, if it does not render her conduct undeserving of condemnation by a jury.
Often the men gathered in some such café and whom preachers and moralists are most ready to condemn have a clearer perception of preachers, church organizations and reformers and their relative importance in the multitudinous life of the world than the preachers, church congregations and reformers have of those in the café or the world outside to which they belong.
If Shakespeare the man had been as marvellous a creature as the genius that wrote his plays, that genius so comprehensive in its intelligence, so wise even in its play, that its clowns are moralists and philosophers, so penetrative that a single one of its phrases reveals to us the secret of our own character, would his contemporaries have left us so wholly without record of him as they have done, distinguishing him in no wise from his fellow-players?
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