Conscience! What is
conscience? Why accept remorse? What is public or private faith?
Mythuses alike enveloped in enormous tradition. If seeing and
acknowledging the lies of the world, Arthur, as see them you can with
only too fatal a clearness, you submit to them without any protest
farther than a laugh: if plunged yourself in easy sensuality, you
allow the whole wretched world to pass groaning by you unmoved: if the
fight for the truth is taking place, and all men of honor are on the
ground armed on the one side or the other, and you alone are to lie on
your balcony and smoke your pipe out of the noise and the danger, you
had better have died, or never have been at all, than such a
sensual coward.
"The truth, friend!" Arthur said, imperturbably; "where is the truth?
Show it me. That is the question between us. I see it on both sides. I
see it in the Conservative side of the house, and among the Radicals,
and even on the ministerial benches. I see it in this man who worships
by act of Parliament, and is rewarded with a silk apron and five
thousand a year; in that man, who, driven fatally by the remorseless
logic of his creed, gives up every thing, friends, fame, dearest ties,
closest vanities, the respect of an army of churchmen, the recognized
position of a leader, and passes over, truth-impelled, to the enemy,
in whose ranks he will serve henceforth as a nameless private
soldier:--I see the truth in that man, as I do in his brother, whose
logic drives him to quite a different conclusion, and who, after
having passed a life in vain endeavors to reconcile an irreconcileable
book, flings it at last down in despair, and declares, with tearful
eyes, and hands up to heaven, his revolt and recantation.
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