Sesterce

“ The dread and trouble of the times filling all minds, men wished to be forehanded with the decrees of Providence. Into this brooding silence the low, vibrating tones of this mysterious voice entered, and this is what we heard:
“Doom! doom! For him—the one—the betrayer—the passing bell is tolling. Hear it, ye weak ones and grow strong. Hear it, ye mighty and tremble. Not alone for him will it ring. For ye! for ye! if the decree of the linked rings goes forth—-”
Here there was a perceptible quiver of the drapery back of the dais. ”

“ The long conflict of a century and more, and the vicissitudes of fortune, which to-day gave one party the power of the persecutor and to-morrow made the same sect the victims of persecution, had simply forced all to the practical conclusion that they must tolerate one another,—that one sect must not attempt to put another down by force. ”

“ Whether that great tenderness toward sectaries, which now so much prevails, be chiefly owing to the fears of popery, or to that spirit of atheism, deism, scepticism, and universal immorality, which all good men so much lament?
Granting popery to have many more errours in religion, than any one branch of the sectaries, let us examine the actions of both, as they have each affected the peace of these kingdoms, with allowance for the short time which the sectaries had to act in, who are in a manner but of yesterday. ”

“ The day comes when all is discovered. They are seized with their accomplices; they are thrown into prison; and their wives and children are implicated. The head of the sect is punished most severely of all, and their source of happiness yields only misfortune. ”

“ And they went and seized him, and bound him, and came with him, and with all the people that were in his house. And he was asked, "Is this your employment, to seize people and bind them in your house, to kill them, and give them to people to eat?" ”

“ You cry out, he would say, we are a ruined, undone people. Why? he would ask, making use of the sorites or syllogism of Zeno and Chrysippus, without knowing it belonged to them.—Why? why are we a ruined people?—Because we are corrupted.—Whence is it, dear Sir, that we are corrupted?—Because we are needy;—our poverty, and not our wills, consent.—And wherefore, he would add, are we needy?—From the neglect, he would answer, of our pence and our halfpence:—Our bank notes, Sir, our guineas,—nay our shillings take care of themselves. ”

“ He distributed four hundred sesterces to each man of the people, and granted to the most distinguished of the senators who were without means an annual salary, [22] to some as much as five hundred thousand sesterces: and to the praetorian cohorts he gave a monthly allowance of grain free of cost. When he was asked according to custom to sign the warrant for the execution of a man who had been condemned to death, he said: "How I wish I had never learned to write!" He greeted men of all orders off-hand and from memory. ”

“ One would think that if obliged to pronounce such a doom upon any, he would do it with tears—that he would retire into his closet, and throw ashes upon his head, and come forth in sackcloth, overwhelmed at the hard necessity which compelled the stern decree. ”

“ I am not angry—but I am nothing.—There is a heretic, at least a girl accused of heresy, confined in your prisons, whom I wish you to free, and, for the love of Heaven, not by the shortest delay to add another moment of sorrow to her heap: she has suffered much. ”

“ For if One Man's Faults could Discharge Another Man of his Duty,there would be no longer any Place left for the Common Offices of Society. To Conclude, We have our Failings, Every Mothers Child of us, and the Improvidence of my Neighbour must not make Me Inhumane. ”

“ But when concession is made, when tears of penitence are wept, and when, in moments of returning confidence, that luckless tendency of temper is candidly confessed, and sincerely bewailed; when all the different acts committed under its influence, are acknowledged to have been wrong, how complete ought to be the reconciliation thus begun, and how zealous our endeavours for the future to avert the consequences of this sad calamity! ”

“ Often, too, he asked himself what manner of man he must be who nursed and reared this narrow sect of the hills—a sect setting judgment before mercy, and law before love—a sect narrowing salvation to units, and drawing the limit line of grace around a fragment of mankind. ”

“ Is one's pride in his sect, his zeal for the propagation of it, his jealousy of any influence that tends to impair its greatness or hinder its progress, likely to be reduced, or is it rather likely to be exalted, by the consciousness that the sect is a very great sect, standing alone for important principles? ”

“ The gazelle stood astonished. "This is property, this is a kingdom; but if I take it to my master he will be killed, for they would say to a poor man, 'Where did you get it?' If he says, 'I picked it up,' he will not be believed; if he says, 'I was given it,' he will not be believed; well then, why should I be the one to go and get my master into difficulties? I will look for people of power—they are the people to use it." ”

“ By thy decree was spilt,
Whose head, upon the charger brought,
Appeased revengeful guilt,
His name, amid a deathless page,
Gleams forth with living ray,
While all thy royalty and pride
Are swept like foam away. ”

“ Entring upon Sequester'd Livings had been Oppression: taking away mens Estates had been Robbery; Imprisoning of their Persons had been Tyranny; using the name of God to all This, would have been Hypocrisy, forcing of Contradictory Oaths had been Impiety, and Shedding the Blood both of the King, and his People, had been Murther: And all This would have appear'd so to be, if the Cause had come to be Try'd by the Known Laws either of God, or of Man. ”

“ The sectaries I have mentioned—around whom, without adopting or even understanding their principles, gradually gathered all the better elements of society, every man of intellect and spirit who had not been murdered, with a still larger proportion of women—seceded separately or in considerable numbers at once; established themselves in those parts of the planet whose less fertile soil or less genial climate had caused them to be abandoned, and there organised societies on the old principles of private ownership and the permanence of household ties. ”

“ There are not wanting on the records of the history of these times abundant proofs, how easily sects, which had borne every human calamity with unshrinking fortitude for conscience' sake, could turn upon their inoffensive, but, in their judgment, erring neighbours, with a like infliction of suffering. ”

“ It is along this path that you may see helpless children crying for bread, and gray hairs sinking in sorrow to the grave! It is here that no innocence, no merit, no truth, no services, can save the unhappy sectary who does not believe in the creed of those in power. ”

“ According to the multitude of my sorrows in my heart, thy comforts have given joy to my soul.
93:20. Doth the seat of iniquity stick to thee, who framest labour in commandment?
Doth the seat of iniquity stick to thee, etc.... That is, wilt thou, O God, who art always just, admit of the seat of iniquity: that is, of injustice, or unjust judges, to have any partnership with thee? Thou who framest, or makest, labour in commandment, that is, thou who obligest us to labour with all diligence to keep thy commandments.
93:21. They will hunt after the soul of the just, and will condemn innocent blood. ”

“ I doubt if it’s in the blood of the people any more; they grumble about it—call it treachery, not chivalry.”
“Those are only the people left over, not the fighters. One learns bad habits if one is left over.... I’m glad we’re both for the thick of it now, Richard.” ”

“ Gloomy and troublesome images force themselves upon his soul, and, from time to time, arouse him from his lethargy by holding out, as if collected into one point, that shocking mass of crimes which make less impression, during their commission, because he only sees them in succession. ”

“ Open the door to toleration, mutual hatred relaxes among the sectaries, their attachment to their particular modes of religion decays; the common occupations and pleasures of life succeed to the acrimony of disputation; and the same man who, in other circumstances, would have braved flames and tortures, is induced to change his sect from the smallest prospect of favor and advancement, or even from the frivolous hope of becoming more fashionable in his principles. ”

“ This modesty in a sect [he remarks in the Autobiography] is perhaps a singular instance in the history of mankind, every [Pg 59] other sect supposing itself in possession of all truth, and that those who differ are so far in the wrong; like a man traveling in foggy weather, those at some distance before him on the road he sees wrapped up in the fog, as well as those behind him, and also the people in the fields on each side, but near him all appears clear, tho' in truth he is as much in the fog as any of them. ”

“ So that every Crime is a sinne; but not every sinne a Crime. ”

“ But now, in evil times, sectarian Will Would split the Body, and to sects reduce Our sainted Mother of th'imperial Isles, Which have for ages from Her bosom drank Those truths immortal, Life and Conscience need. ”

“ No wall of division, no sea of separation, would have proved so effectual, so insurmountable, as his own firm resolve that his earthly path should never cross that of one whom God’s statutes had set apart until death annulled the decree. ”

“ By some of the dark ingenuities of that age of priestcraft a curious thing was discovered--that if you kill every usurer, every forestaller, every adulterater, every user of false weights, every fixer of false boundaries, every land-thief, every water-thief, you afterwards discover by a strange indirect miracle, or disconnected truth from heaven, that you have no millionaires. ”

“ Beware, however, how thou attemptest to deceive me, lest my vengeance, quick, sure, and unforeseen as the secret agency of the Epoptæ, should fall upon and crush thee at the very moment of the fruition of thy wishes. ”

“ Perhaps it may be something of this sort: that a single sin unrepented of and unatoned for becomes a destiny; a seed from which, however diminutive and trifling it may look, a whole life of crime and wickedness shoots up as a matter of course, perhaps inevitably. ”

“ This is the source of the erroneous excesses of Remorse and Revenge; the one extending itself over the future, and the other over the past; provinces in which their suggestions can only be the sources of evil. The purpose of a resolution to act more wisely and virtuously in future, and the sense of a necessity of caution in repressing an enemy, are the sources from which the enormous superstitions implied in the words cited have arisen. ”

“ If we followed the same mood of fancy, it would be more difficult to imagine what awful hint or wild picture of the universe called forth that primal persecution, what secret of sensational thought lies buried under the brutal stones. ”

“ Of low people zevil tiver, [233] there are eleven sects, which no respectable people touch under pain of death: and between each other there is a great difference and separation, and one family does not mix with another. ”

“ Entering their houses by force and violence, and seizing their possessions, they leap on the threshold, as much as to say that the house is their own and they will keep their hold of it; and, accordingly, they make all in it their own that they can lay their hands on, and so fill their masters' houses with goods gotten by violence and deceit and with all the guilt thereby contracted. ”

“ For in some parts of the nation care had been timely taken, by some not of the lowest rank, to choose out some particular persons—men of sharp wit, close countenances, pliant tempers, and deep dissimulation—and send them forth among the sectaries, so called, with instructions to thrust themselves into all societies, conform to all or any sort of religious profession, Proteus-like change their shapes, and transform themselves from one religious appearance to another as occasion should require. ”

“ He thought that the evils inseparably annexed to our condition, such as death, sickness, and the loss of those tenderly beloved, were trials sufficient, without our unnecessarily increasing the load by fictitious ones—clearly the result of our follies, contentions, and prejudices. ”

“ Worse still are words which seek to turn the edge of the divine threatenings against some sin by a jest; as when in France a subtle poison, by whose aid impatient heirs delivered themselves from those who stood between them and the inheritance which they coveted, was called 'poudre de succession.' We might suppose beforehand that such cloaks for sin would be only found among people in an advanced state of artificial cultivation. ”

“ Here was the Fault transferr'd to the Office, which is a Dangerous Error; for not only Government, but Human Society it self may be dissolved by the same Argument, if the Frailties or Corruptions of Particular Men shall be Reveng'd upon the whole. ”

“ Perhaps you'll contend that the old order is overthrown, that family has gone to the devil? You are right, and there's the pity of it! Where are the great names? A race of upstarts has taken their place—sons of nobody—nephews of nobody—cousins of nobody—I observe only deterioration in the trend of modern life. ”

“ When we come to the sciences of the day the knowledge of the sectarian world is very extensive; the same is true of their morality; but when we come to read out of the Book of Life the words of the Almighty to the people, and compare them with the knowledge of the sectarian world, I am reminded of the words of Geo. ”