- end_line
- 1815
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:47:57.722Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 1756
- text
- is not permitted to be; and even if it were, no judicious moralist would
make proclamation of it.
This gentleman, therefore, there is reason to affirm, was one who, like
the Hebrew governor, knew how to keep his hands clean, and who never in
his life happened to be run suddenly against by hurrying house-painter,
or sweep; in a word, one whose very good luck it was to be a very good
man.
Not that he looked as if he were a kind of Wilberforce at all; that
superior merit, probably, was not his; nothing in his manner bespoke him
righteous, but only good, and though to be good is much below being
righteous, and though there is a difference between the two, yet not, it
is to be hoped, so incompatible as that a righteous man can not be a
good man; though, conversely, in the pulpit it has been with much
cogency urged, that a merely good man, that is, one good merely by his
nature, is so far from there by being righteous, that nothing short of a
total change and conversion can make him so; which is something which no
honest mind, well read in the history of righteousness, will care to
deny; nevertheless, since St. Paul himself, agreeing in a sense with the
pulpit distinction, though not altogether in the pulpit deduction, and
also pretty plainly intimating which of the two qualities in question
enjoys his apostolic preference; I say, since St. Paul has so meaningly
said, that, "scarcely for a righteous man will one die, yet peradventure
for a good man some would even dare to die;" therefore, when we repeat
of this gentleman, that he was only a good man, whatever else by severe
censors may be objected to him, it is still to be hoped that his
goodness will not at least be considered criminal in him. At all events,
no man, not even a righteous man, would think it quite right to commit
this gentleman to prison for the crime, extraordinary as he might deem
it; more especially, as, until everything could be known, there would be
some chance that the gentleman might after all be quite as innocent of
it as he himself.
It was pleasant to mark the good man's reception of the salute of the
righteous man, that is, the man in gray; his inferior, apparently, not
more in the social scale than in stature. Like the benign elm again, the
good man seemed to wave the canopy of his goodness over that suitor, not
in conceited condescension, but with that even amenity of true majesty,
which can be kind to any one without stooping to it.
To the plea in behalf of the Seminole widows and orphans, the gentleman,
after a question or two duly answered, responded by producing an ample
pocket-book in the good old capacious style, of fine green French
morocco and workmanship, bound with silk of the same color, not to omit
bills crisp with newness, fresh from the bank, no muckworms' grime upon
them. Lucre those bills might be, but as yet having been kept unspotted
from the world, not of the filthy sort. Placing now three of those
virgin bills in the applicant's hands, he hoped that the smallness of
the contribution would be pardoned; to tell the truth, and this at last
accounted for his toilet, he was bound but a short run down the river,
to attend, in a festive grove, the afternoon wedding of his niece: so
did not carry much money with him.
The other was about expressing his thanks when the gentleman in his
pleasant way checked him: the gratitude was on the other side. To him,
he said, charity was in one sense not an effort, but a luxury; against
too great indulgence in which his steward, a humorist, had sometimes
admonished him.
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