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Arnold, Matthew, 1822-1888

"Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold"

" We all recollect the
famous verse in our translation: "Then Satan answered the Lord and said:
'Doth Job fear God for nought?'" Franklin makes this: "Does your Majesty
imagine that Job's good conduct is the effect of mere personal
attachment and affection?" I well remember how, when first I read that,
I drew a deep breath of relief and said to myself: "After all, there is
a stretch of humanity beyond Franklin's victorious good sense!" So,
after hearing Bentham cried loudly up as the renovator of modern
society, and Bentham's mind and ideas proposed as the rulers of our
future, I open the _Deontology._[422] There I read: "While Xenophon was
writing his history and Euclid teaching geometry, Socrates and Plato
were talking nonsense under pretense of talking wisdom and morality.
This morality of theirs consisted in words; this wisdom of theirs was
the denial of matters known to every man's experience." From the moment
of reading that, I am delivered from the bondage of Bentham! the
fanaticism of his adherents can touch me no longer.


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