James Anthony Froude

“ ENGLAND'S FORGOTTEN WORTHIES The Reformation, the Antipodes, the American Continent, the Planetary system, and the Infinite deep of the Heavens have now become common and familiar facts to us. Globes and orreries are the playthings of our school-days; we inhale the spirit of Protestantism with our earliest breath of consciousness; it is all but impossible to throw back our imagination into the time when, as new grand discoveries, they stirred every mind which they touched with awe and wonder at the revelation which God had sent down among mankind. ”

“ Let us follow knowledge to the outer circle of the universe, the eye will not be satisfied with seeing, nor the ear with hearing. Let us build our streets of gold, and they will hide as many aching hearts as hovels of straw. The well-being of mankind is not advanced a single step. Knowledge is power, and wealth is power; and harnessed, as in Plato's fable, to the chariot of the soul, and guided by wisdom, they may bear it through the circle of the stars. ”

“ Men are not good or bad, noble or base—thank God for it!—as they judge well or ill of the probabilities of nature, but as they love God and hate the devil. And yet it is instructive. We have heard grave good men—men of intellect and influence—with all the advantages of modern science, learning, experience; men who would regard Anselm with sad and serious pity; yet tell us stories, as having fallen within their own experience, of the marvels of mesmerism, to the full as ridiculous (if anything is ridiculous) as this of the poor decapitated Kieran. ”

“ The earth was created pure and lovely—a garden of delight of its own free accord, loading itself with fruit and flower, and everything most exquisite and beautiful. No bird or beast of prey broke the eternal peace which reigned over its hospitable surface. In calm and quiet intercourse, the leopard lay down by the kid, the lion browsed beside the ox, and the corporeal frame of man, knowing neither decay, nor death, nor unruly appetite, nor any change or infirmity, was pure as the pure immortal substance of the unfallen angels. ”

“ Evil is unhappily too real a thing to be so disposed of.
Yet if we cannot believe Spinoza's system taken in its entire completeness, yet we may not blind ourselves to the beauty of his practical rule of life, or the disinterestedness and calm nobility which pervades it. He will not hear of a virtue which desires to be rewarded. Virtue is the power of God in the human soul, and that is the exhaustive end of all human desire. ”

“ Our imagination following the costume did imperceptibly betray our judgment; we admired the human intellect, the ever ready prompt sagacity and presence of mind. We delighted in the satire on the foolishnesses and greedinesses of our own fellow mankind; but in our regard for the hero we forgot his humanity wherever it was his interest that we should forget it, and while we admired him as a man we judged him only as a fox. ”

“ Surely, there is a love which exults in the power of self-abandonment, and can glory in the privilege of suffering for what is good. Que mon nom soit fletri, pourvu que la France soit libre, said Danton; and those wild patriots who had trampled into scorn the faith in an immortal life in which they would be rewarded for what they were suffering, went to their graves as beds, for the dream of a people's liberty. Shall we, who would be thought reasonable men, love the living God with less heart than these poor men loved their phantom? ”

“ Such is the theory of life which is to be found in the Book of Job; a faith which has flashed up in all times and all lands, wherever noble men were to be found, and which passed in Christianity into the acknowledged creed of half the world. The cross was the new symbol, the divine sufferer the great example, and mankind answered to the call, because the appeal was not to what was poor and selfish in them, but to whatever of best and bravest was in their nature. The law of reward and punishment was superseded by the law of love. Thou shalt love God and thou shalt love man ”

“ But if that dark time is ever literally to come upon the earth, there are no present signs of it. The creed of eighteen centuries is not about to fade away like an exhalation, nor are the new lights of science so exhilarating that serious persons can look with comfort to exchanging one for the other. Christianity has abler advocates than its professed defenders, in those many quiet and humble men and women who in the light of it and the strength of it live holy, beautiful, and self-denying lives. The God that answer by fire is the God whom mankind will acknowledge ”

“ Henceforth it is impossible for us to give our unmixed admiration to any character which moral shadows overhang. Henceforth we require not greatness only, but goodness; and not that goodness only which begins and ends in conduct correctly regulated, but that love of goodness, that keen pure feeling for it, which resides in a conscience as sensitive and susceptible as woman's modesty.
So much for what seems to us the philosophy of this matter. If we are right, it is no more than a first furrow in the crust of a soil, which hitherto the historians have been contented to leave in its barrenness. ”

“ But with Socrates a change came over philosophy; a sign—perhaps a cause—of the decline of the existing religion. The study of man superseded the study of nature: a purer Theism came in with the higher ideal of perfection, and sin and depravity at once assumed an importance the intensity of which made every other question insignificant. How man could know the good and yet choose the evil; how God could be all pure and almighty, and yet evil have broken into his creation, these were the questions which thenceforth were the perplexity of every thinker. ”

“ Whatever is great, or good, or pathetic, or terrible, in any age past or present, belongs to him, and is within his proper province; but most especially, if he is wise, he will select his subjects out of those which time has sealed as permanently significant. It is not easy in our own age to distinguish what has the elements in it of enduring importance; and time is wiser than we. But why dwell with such apparent exclusiveness on classic antiquity, as if there was no antiquity except the classic, and as if time were divided into the eras of Greece and Rome and the nineteenth century? ”

“ Happiness, therefore, is not what we are to look for. Our place is to be true to the best which we know, to seek that and do that; and if by "virtue its own reward" he meant that the good man cares only to continue good, desiring nothing more; then it is true and noble. But if virtue be valued, because it is politic, because in pursuit of it will be found most enjoyment and fewest sufferings, then it is not noble any more, and it is turning the truth of God into a lie. Let us do right, and whether happiness come or unhappiness is no very mighty matter. ”

“ If man can incur guilt, their actions might be other than they are. If they cannot act otherwise than they do, they cannot incur guilt. So at least it appears to us; yet, in the darkness of our knowledge, we would not complain merely of a theory, and if our earthly life were all in all, and the grave remained the extreme horizon of our hopes and fears, the "Harmonic Pre-etablie," might be tolerated as credible, and admired as ingenious and beautiful. It is when forcibly attached to a creed of the future, with which it has no natural connection, that it assumes its repulsive features. ”

“ If it come, life will be sweet; if it do not come, life will be bitter —bitter, not sweet, and yet to be borne. On such a theory alone is the government of this world intelligibly just. The well-being of our souls depends only on what we are, and nobleness of character is nothing else but steady love of good, and steady scorn of evil. The government of the world is a problem while the desire of selfish enjoyment survives, and when justice is not done according to such standard (which will not be till the day after doomsday, and not then) , self-loving men will still ask, why? ”

“ Paganism, as a creed, was entirely physical. When Paganism rose men had not begun to reflect upon themselves, or the infirmities of their own nature. The bad man was a bad man—the coward a coward—the liar a liar—individually hateful and despicable. But in hating and despising such unfortunates, the old Greeks were satisfied to have felt all that was necessary about them; and how such a phenomenon as a bad man came to exist in this world, they scarcely cared to inquire. There is no evil spirit in the mythology as an antagonist of the gods. ”

“ Whether really successful is a question we do not care here to enter on; but only to say this—that of all unsuccessful men in every sense, either divine, or human, or devilish, there is none equal to old Bunyan's Mr. Facing-both-ways —the fellow with one eye on Heaven and one on earth —who sincerely preaches one thing, and sincerely does another; and from the intensity of his unreality is unable either to see or feel the contradiction. Serving God with his lips, and with the half of his mind which is not bound up in the world ”

“ Adam sinned—no matter how—he sinned; the sin was the one terrible fact: moral evil was brought into the world by the only creature who was capable of committing it. Sin entered in, and death by sin; death and disease, storm and pestilence, earthquake and famine. The imprisoned passions of the wild animals were let loose, and earth and air became full of carnage; worst of all, maws animal nature came out in gigantic strength, the carnal lusts, unruly appetites, jealousies, hatred, rapine, and murder; and then the law, and with it, of course, breaches of the law, and sin on sin. ”

“ We are forced to acknowledge that it was not a very virtuous age in which Reineke made himself a great man; but that was the fault of the age as much as the fault of him. His nature is to succeed wherever he is. If the age had required something else of him, then he would have been something else. Whatever it had said to him "do, and I will make you my hero," that Reineke would have done. No appetite makes a slave of him—no faculty refuses obedience to his will. His entire nature is under perfect organic control to the one supreme authority. ”

“ We wonder at the grandeur, the moral majesty, of some of Shakespeare's characters, so far beyond what the noblest among ourselves can imitate, and at first thought we attribute it to the genius of the poet who has outstripped nature in his creations; but we are misunderstanding the power and the meaning of poetry in attributing creativeness to it in any such sense; Shakespeare created, but only as the spirit of nature created around him, working in him as it worked abroad in those among whom he lived. The men whom he draws were such men as he saw and knew ”