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Untitled Article
be imposed upon b y her benevolence ; and she never palters with herself . She employs no effort to make out a case , to get up a pleasant picture . It is because she has first felt the eood herself , that she so simply and naturally , often so beautifully and persuasively , points it out to others .
The desirableness of cultivating this disposition is very obvious , and therefore it is that Miss Taylor ' s writings have our warm
recommendation . They are not the less efficient means for that purpose , from her not formally p roposing it as an object , or perhaps not being always herself conscious of the tendency . The charm and the utility are not in what she intends to do , or in what she
actually does , but in what , as an author , she is . The spirit which animates her writings is a moral influence to which the young cannot be too extensively subjected ; yet in these our troublous and conflicting days , we cannot let our commendation go without a caution .
The perception of good must not be allowed to cripple the energy which is required for the destruction of evil . Our ready recognition of the * one virtue' of some royal or political corsair should not make us forget or less strongly feel the fact , that it is linked with ' a thousand crimes / Nor should it make us less feel
that his victims have probably a larger proportion of virtue , or that whatever the proportions may be , rapine and cruelty should not be perpetrated if we can help it . It is good to be sensible of the poetical and moral associations , which mantle like ivy over old abbey or castle walls , but that sensibility should not enfeeble the higher and holier though sterner impulse which prompts to the assault of time-hallowed piles , and , if needful , their total
demolition when they have become fortresses of ignorance , resorts of reptiles , or dens of banditti . It would have been a weak reason
for not routing the royal army , that the tyrant had a Falkland in his camp . And there is another way in which this disposition to delight in the beauty that sojourns amid deformity , tends to enervate the power of active usefulness to mankind . It is naturally accompanied with a strong perception of the converse of the proposition . It detects the evil that lurks amid things good , and is apt to be disproportionately repelled by that ; repelled even by its strong sense of the moral loveliness with which such evil is cornmingled . Thus many pure and devout persons so grieved at the violence of the reformer Luther , that they almost or entirely sank
back into the bosom of popery , where they knew there had been and was so much of true religion amid all its errors ; and rather retarded than accelerated that most essential work of reformation which perhaps a less violent leader would have failed to accomplish . f Woe unto you , hypocrites / is not less gospel than ' Come , ye blessed . ' They are different portions of the clad tidings to humanity , of which the one must be read through , to come at the other .
Untitled Article
Tales of the English' 815
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Dec. 2, 1833, page 815, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2628/page/11/
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