mercy they have ever shewn?
What softening of character is to be had, what review of their social
situations and duties is to be taught by these examples, to Kings, to
Nobles, to Men of Property, to Women, and to Infants? The Royal
Family perished, because it was royal. The Nobles perished, because
they were noble. The Men, Women and Children, who had property,
because they had property to be robbed of. The Priests were
punished, after they had been robbed of their all, not for their vices,
but for their virtues and their piety, which made them an honour to
their sacred profession, and to that nature, of which we ought to be
proud, since they belong to it. My Lord, nothing can be learned from
such examples, except the danger of being Kings, Queens, Nobles,
Priests, and Children to be butchered on account of their inheritance.
These are things, at which not Vice, not Crime, not Folly, but Wisdom,
Goodness, Learning, Justice, Probity, Beneficence stand aghast. By
these examples our reason and our moral sense are not enlightened,
but confounded; and there is no refuge for astonished and affrighted
virtue, but being annihilated in humility and submission, sinking into a
silent adoration of the inscrutable dispensations of Providence, and
flying with trembling wings from this world of daring crimes, and
feeble, pusillanimous, half-bred, bastard Justice, to the asylum of
another order of things, in an unknown form, but in a better life.
Whatever the Politician or Preacher of September or of October may
think of the matter, it is a most comfortless, disheartening, desolating
example. Dreadful is the example of ruined innocence and virtue, and
the compleatest triumph of the compleatest villainy, that ever vexed
and disgraced mankind! The example is ruinous in every point of
view, religious, moral, civil, political. It establishes that dreadful
maxim of Machiavel, that in great affairs men are not to be wicked by
halves. This maxim is not made for a middle sort of beings, who,
because they cannot be Angels, ought to thwart their ambition and
not endeavour to become infernal spirits. It is too well exemplified in
the present time, where the faults and errours of humanity, checked
by the imperfect timorous virtues, have been overpowered by those,
who have stopped at no crime. It is a dreadful part of the example,
that infernal malevolence has had pious apologists, who read their
lectures on frailties in favour of crimes; who abandoned the weak, and
court the friendship of the wicked. To root out these maxims, and the
examples that support them, is a wise object of years of war. This is
that war. This is that moral war. It was said by old Trivulzio, that the
battle of Marignan was the battle of the Giants, that all the rest of the
p. 336
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p. 337-4.1 p. 337-4.2
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