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of his position . As Chancellor , he has to receive and distribute the money so liberally paid by a nation " whose duties are pleasures , " ( to use Jerbold ' s witticism ;) as Man of Letters and Orator does he not betray the same capacity ? Words which are " the counters of wise men and the money of fools , " he gathers whence he can , and makes an oration as he makes a budget , from the " contributions" of Jones , Jenkinson , and Jukes . The quick adroit Mosaic Arab that he is , how deftly he makes a
mosaic work which shall glitter like gold before admiring eyes ! What eloquence , what adroitness , what fluency , what comprehension ! If you read the Budget he will shortly lay before you , and , in reading it , see how he deals with thousands , no thought of the stupid Jones , the respectable Jenkinson , or the obese Jukes , and their fellows who contributed the thousands , will occur to your mind ; all attention will be fixed on the great administrator . So with his orations ; you never think of whence they
come . » A troublesome critic in the Globe has , unfortunately , a tenacious memory ; and he has proved , by citation of the passages , that the peroration of D'Israeli ' s speech on the Duke of Wellington is almost a literal reproduction of what Thieks had written of Gouvion de St . Cyr . It lias an ugly look one must confess . It implies such scanty wealth to borrow small sums from a poor man ; and to borrow them not on an accidental occasion , but on an occasion duly prepared ! Moliere with gay audacity might say Je reprends mon Men ou je le trouve j but he made good his claim to it , and the thing was worth appropriating ; but D'Israeli
does not make good his claim , and appropriates nothing but commonplaces after all . Old ( Eschylus disdained not to borrow scraps from the great Homeric banquet—r £ / j , a \ rj riov ' O / x-qpov fteyaXojv henrvwv—as he himself confesses . Raphael did not disdain to transplant whole figures from Masaccio and Fra Bartolommeo . Mozart boldly pillaged from Gluck ; and Rossini gaily appropriated his opening air of the Barber of Seville , from an opera of the same name then being performed , and gaily answered the remonstrant composer , " Very well , take one of mine . "
Therefore it is not the fact of plagiarism or appropriation D'Israeli need be ashamed of ; it is the thing stolen , and the source , and the manner , and the occasion ; the thing was not worth stealing ; the source , a Frenchman not of any considerable worth , and singularly antagonistic to England ; the manner was shabby , secret , unlike the openness of the plagiarism we have just alluded to ; and the occasion one of those solemn moments that give Oratory a dignity and an inspiration , a stimulus and an opportunity—moments when , if ever , the heart should throb in the accents , and the intellect be merely an interpreter of national emotion .
Hitherto we believed Alexandre Dumas to be the most shameless plagiarist of modern Literature ; but on due consideration of the gravity of the present offence , we think he must concede the palm to D'Israeli . Palmam qui meruit ferat . '
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It may interest our readers , as it assuredly must interest all concerned in the London University , to learn that David Masson has been elected Professor of English Literature , in place of Professor Clough . Among the young men in this age standing " in the foremost files of time , " and acting as beneficent yeast in the fermentation of great questions , there are fuw , if any , one could name as bearing a nobler burden of grave thoughts and high aspirations than David Masson ; working , as he has done , for some years anonymously , his name is little known beyond literary circles ; but now that he has some professional distinction which may lead him into niore avowed publicity , it will not be long before so much and varied talent , moved by a profoundly serious nature , will gather round his name the homage of all competent to estimate him .
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BUTLER ' S ANALOGY v . MODKUN UNBELIEF . / T / 'f Analogy of Relh / ion , Natural and Revealed . By 'Bishop Butlor . ( Holm ' s Mancliu-d Library . ) Jl . 0 . Boiin .
I THIRD A . RTICI .. K . rn I- J '• no peculiar sophistry which runs through ' . Butler's line of argument has jl'i vad y |) o , m 3 aniply illustrated in our previous notices ; ( ho reader , there-()| 1 ( - > will nol , be astonished t ; o find ' . Butler quietly assuming (( "Imp . VII . ) hat < iH the analogy of Nature " gives a strong credibility to the general < io < : fi-Jn , > of Religion , and U > several particular tliinys contained in il ; eon"" li'i-e d an ho mn , ny matters of fart , " although ( he assumption i . s analogous 0 'hat of t , Ju , existence of the hipnojrrif , because winged creatures exist . ll < l ( 1 <> < l , it is extremel y dilliculf to handle Butler , he is ho slippery , and 'I' * " * no many issues " through . which to escape ; thus he makes n great Miiinnit
' out of | , 1 , ( , " incomprehensibility" of the world ' s scheme . ' •' poii supposition that ( iod exercises amoral government over ( . lie world , the i . i ogy of | , j s ,, „( ,,,.,, ! j , ( m ,, ¦ ,,,, „ .,, ( , suggests and makes it credible ( hat bin moral ^ ' 'niincii | , must b (> ii , scheme <| uite beyond our comprehension ; and this ullords u " " " a ' '" i .-iwcr to all objections against the justice and goodness of il . " ( " ih an old theological a . rtilice . -A Her dogmatically declaring Mmf , ( ](! u did this , intended that , nnd will do the other , if you niako any n , A' lon ' a | 1 <> hnprcBHively informed ( hat "God ' s ways are in'"iil . sihl ,. . " VVe believe ho ; but because they are in . smif . ablo wo renin ( , I ! ,. "" ! ll |'( ' (< 'llH' <> n of scrutinizing them . That the Finite cannot doiimrotli , ' . ' !" ' '"''" i ' o i . s 1 , 1 m very lmnin of our antagonism . Wo do nol , admit r ,, | ' '' ^' <> '' Ignorance to dictate to u . s anything beyond a aeiiHeof hunible . ^ ! Hn ( ' < Butler , however , thinks thai , he makes a strong bulwark liiio ' " ' i o ' -i <'<' ( ' iollH l > . y pleading " ( he incomprehensible . " We do not l »< 'u V' " ' "V - bill , ( hat wliut appears evil to us may not in reality be ? Jliei al ; which ih auite truo : wo do not know ; neither do we know " ll ' * " bAioilciul !
He will hear of no objection against " the scheme . ' " After these observations it may be proper to add , in order to obviate an absurd and wicked conclusion from any of them , that though the constitution of our nature from whence we are capable of vice and misery may , as it undoubtedly does , contribute to the perfection and happiness of the world ; and though the actual permission of evil may be beneficial to it ( i . e ., it would have been more mischievous , not that a wicked person had himself abstained from his own wickedness , but that any one had forcibly prevented it , than that it was permitted ) : yet ,
notwithstanding , it might have been much better for the world if this very evil had never been done . Nay , it is most clearly conceivable , that the very commission of wickedness may be beneficial to the world , and yet , that it would be infinitely more beneficial for men to refrain from it . For thus , in tlie wise and good constitution of the natural world , there are disorders which bring- their own cures ; diseases which are themselves remedies . Many a man would have died , had it not been for the gout or a fever ; yet it would be thought , madness to assert that sickness is a better or more perfect state than health ; though the like , with regard to the moral world , has been asserted . "
JN ^ ow , waiving for a moment the question as to Who made the wickedness , let us simply ask whether the terror of hell is not in the nature of a forcible prevention of evil ? God is said to permit wickedness , and this permission is more beneficial than any " forcible prevention" would have been ; if so , why the coercion of denunciatory threats ? When you hang a murderer , " as an example , " do you not mean thereby to " prevent " others by the terror of the gallows ? Let us grant , however , the " incomprehensibility" as a fair ground of argument : — " So that we are placed , as one may speak , in the middle of a scheme , not a fixed but a progressive one , every way incomprehensible ; incomprehensible in a manner equall y with respect to what lias been , what now is , and what shallb > ) hereafter . And this scheme cannot but contain in it somewhat as wonderful , as much beyond our thought and conception as anything in that of Religion . "
Let us grant this general statement , and we shall still have to ask where lies the particular proof ? For it is obvious that a Mahometan might use that argument with equal effect . In the Koran there are difficulties , and things quite as much beyond our conception as in the scheme of JN " ature ; is the Koran therefore true ? Wherever we turn , we see Butler ' s arguments so deplorably weak that were we not familiar with , theological polemics , we should wonder at the celebrity of the book ; here , however , is a passage of such adroit application that it alone would suffice to endear it to all true sons of the church . ( The italics are the author ' s ) : —
"As Christianity served these ends and purposes when it was first published by the miraculous publication itself : so it was intended to serve the same purposes in future ages by means of the . settlement of a visible church : of a society distinguished from common ones , and from the rest of tlie world , by peculiar religious institutions ; by an instituted method of instruction , and an instituted form of external Religion . Miraculous powers were given to the first preachers of Christianity , iu order to their introducing it into the world : a visible church was established , in order to continue it and ccuf-ry it on successively throughout all ages . Had Moses and the Prophets , Christ and his Apostles , only taught , and by miracles proved Religion to their contemporaries , the benefits of their instructions would
have reached but to a small part of mankind . Christianity must have been in a great degree sunk and forgot in a very ihw ages . To prevent this appears to have been one reason why a visible church was instituted ; to be like a city upon a hill , a standing memorial to the world of the duty which we owe our Maker ; to call men continually both by example and instruction to attend to it , and by the form of Religion ever before their eyes remind them of the reality ; to be the repository of the oracles of ( Jod ; to hold up tlie light of revelation in aid to that of nature , and propagate it throughout all generations to the end of the world—the light of revelation , considered hero iu no other view , than as designed to enforce natural Religion . "
The question which incessantly recurs is not whether , if Revealed . " Religion be true , we can " reconcile" what it teaches with what . Nature teaches ; because it is quite clear thai ; Nature as God ' s Book will not contradict the Bible , if ( hat be also God ' a Book ; no , the question specifically in , Can we accept ; the Bible as God ' s Book r and , if so , why so P Therefore , in the- second purl , of hi . s work , Butler undertakes to treat specifically of [ Revealed Religion , but he does so in the same stiifly way we have before condemned . Thus he has two arguments in favour of Christianity : —•
" First . Then ; is no presumption , from analogy , against the truth of if , upon account of its not being discoverable ! by reason or experience , h ' or suppose one who never heard of revelation , of the most , improved understanding , nnd acquainted with our whole system of natural philosophy nnd natural religion ; wich a one could not but be sensihlo that , it , was but a very small part of the natural suid moral system of the universe which he was acquainted with . lie could not but bo sensible thnfc ( hen ; must he innumerable things in ( he dispensations of Providence past , in the invisible government over the world at present wiry ing on , and iu what is to conic , of which he was wholly ignorant , ami which coultl not he . discovered , without revelation . Whether this scheme of nature be , in the strictest senae , inliuito or not , it in evidently vast , even beyond all possible imagination . And doubtless that part of it which is opened to our view is but us a point , in comparison of the whole ' plan of Providence , reaching throughout eternity iiust and future ; in compitriNon of
what is even now going on in this remote parts of t ho boundless universe ; nay , in comparison of the whole nchemo of this world . And , therefore , that things lie beyond flu ; natural reach of our faculties , i . s no sort of presumption against the truth and reality of them ; because it is certain ( here are iiummcruhlc ( lungs , in ( ho constitution and government , of the universe , which are thus beyond the natural reach of our faculties , tircond / i / . Analogy raises no presumption against any of the things continued in thin general doctrine of Scripture now mentioned , upon account ; of their being unlike the known course of nature . For there in no presumption at all from analogy , that ( he whole , course of things , or divine government , naturally unknown to us , and evcry f Mny in it , ia like to anything in that , which is known , and therefore- no peculiar presumption against anything hi thu former , upon account of its being unlike to anything in tho Jut . tor . And in tho eoiiritituiiua nml natural government of tho world , as well uh in the moral govern-
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November 20 , 1852 . ] THE LEADER . 1117
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Leader (1850-1860), Nov. 20, 1852, page 1117, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse2.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1961/page/17/
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