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Untitled Article
his motives were not pure . Godmothership , if it were divine , was not instituted to * perpetuate friendship between families / The design was akin to the Corinthian sin of intending to make a meal of the sacrament . Mr . Marvell , you were wrong ; and your conscience must have had an awful squint when one of its eyes was thus fixed on earth while the . other was turned up to
heaven . Well , now we come to the water ' s edge , and it is a comfort to meet with the watermen , the most judicious and moral persons we have yet encountered in the story ; for * it being extremely rough , so as to render the passage dangerous , ' they 4 earnestly dissuaded her from any attempt to cross the river that day . ' There spoke her good genii . No white knights , kelpies , or water kings they , but good men and true . It is enough to m ake
one respect a waterman as long as one lives , even though he is not a fireman , and opens coach doors . ' The worthy old clergyman did , in this instance , hear reason . He was now in favourable circumstances for the perception of truth—hisVchild had got a godmother . He thought the mother ' s fondness and the daughter ' s duty might ' wait for better weather ? How weak not to take his stand there , and defend the approach to the Humber
with that same ' gold-headed cane' which was soon to be the sad relic of his sad fate ! Why could not he have been resolutely bent , ' as well as she ? An orthodox divine , who had earned the cognomen of the * facetious Calvinist , ' might be unbending . We are hard to please ; for , having condemned his weakness , we must now condemn his energy . * He thought himself obliged , both in honour and conscience ^ to share the danger with her /
Very heroic ; but heroism has generally wanted brains , from the days of Ajax downwards . Honour and conscience ! what do the words mean , as a rule of conduct and a ground of obligation ? The fantastical things , they would not let the wrongheaded young lady go alone in the boat , but they had no scruples on behalf of the poor watermen ; no concern for their precious lives , and their destitute widows and orphans . He persuaded' them . Oh ! the nefarious casuist ! He influenced them to become accessories to
what he knew was wrong , and had shown the lady to be wrong , but she would go ; and so they , who had no honour and conscience obliging them , were to be pitilessly persuaded to the sacrifice of themselves and the destitution of their families . We should not wonder if he actually bribed them , and thus sent them to the bottom of the Humber with the weight of the sin of avarice upon their souls . * Armed with innocence , * indeed I What could be more nocent than all this waste of life ? And were
there no duties to society which the divine could not , innocently , neglect ? Had he no congregation ? What was to become of his parishioners the next Sabbath morning ? How forlorn must the Church have been 1 * The hungry sheep look up , and are riot fed ? Only a yekx after , the great contest commenced . How
Untitled Article
On the Morality of Andrew MarvelVs Father . 765
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Nov. 2, 1832, page 765, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1824/page/45/
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