Another voice was that of the Corn Law convert, whose phantom he had
just seen in the quadrangle with a great bell. Jude thought his soul
might have been shaping the historic words of his master-speech: "Sir, I may be wrong, but my impression is that my duty towards a
country threatened with famine requires that that which has been the
ordinary remedy under all similar circumstances should be resorted to
now, namely, that there should be free access to the food of man from
whatever quarter it may come... Deprive me of office to-morrow, you
can never deprive me of the consciousness that I have exercised the
powers committed to me from no corrupt or interested motives, from no
desire to gratify ambition, for no personal gain."
Then the sly author of the immortal Chapter on Christianity: "How
shall we excuse the supine inattention of the Pagan and philosophic
world, to those evidences [miracles] which were presented by
Omnipotence? ... The sages of Greece and Rome turned aside from the
awful spectacle, and appeared unconscious of any alterations in the
moral or physical government of the world."
Then the shade of the poet, the last of the optimists:
How the world is made for each of us!
* * * * * And each of the Many helps to recruit
The life of the race by a general plan.
Then one of the three enthusiasts he had seen just now, the author of
the _Apologia_: "My argument was ... that absolute certitude as to the truths of
natural theology was the result of an assemblage of concurring and
converging probabilities ... that probabilities which did not reach
to logical certainty might create a mental certitude."
The second of them, no polemic, murmured quieter things:
Why should we faint, and fear to live alone,
Since all alone, so Heaven has will'd, we die?
He likewise heard some phrases spoken by the phantom with the short
face, the genial Spectator: "When I look upon the tombs of the great, every motion of envy dies
in me; when I read the epitaphs of the beautiful, every inordinate
desire goes out; when I meet with the grief of parents upon a
tombstone, my heart melts with compassion; when I see the tombs of
the parents themselves, I consider the vanity of grieving for those
whom we must quickly follow."
And lastly a gentle-voiced prelate spoke, during whose meek, familiar
rhyme, endeared to him from earliest childhood, Jude fell asleep:
Teach me to live, that I may dread
The grave as little as my bed.
Teach me to die ...