Excerpt from The Ethics of the Dust: Fiction, Fair and Foul; The Elements of Drawing
And thus, however the book may fail in its intention of suggesting new occupations or interests to its younger readers, I think it worth reprinting, in the way I have also reprinted "Unto this Last," - page for page; that the students of my more advanced works may be able to refer to these as the original documents of them; of which the most essential in this book are these following.
I. The explanation of the baseness of the avaricious functions of the Lower Pthah, p. 39, with his beetle-gospel, p. 41, "that a nation can stand on its vices better than on its virtues," explains the main motive of all my books on Political Economy.
II. The examination of the connexion between stupidity and crime, pp. 57-62, anticipated all that I have had to urge in Fors Clavigera against the commonly alleged excuse for public wickedness, - "They don"t mean it - they don"t know any better."
III. The examination of the roots of Moral Power, pp. 90-92, is a summary of what is afterwards developed with utmost care in my inaugural lecture at Oxford on the relation of Art to Morals; compare in that lecture, §§ 83-85, with the sentence in p. 91 of this book, "Nothing is ever done so as really to please our Father, unless we would also have done it, though we had had no Father to know of it."
This sentence, however, it must be observed, regards only the general conditions of action in the children of God, in consequence of which it is foretold of them by Christ that they will say at the Judgment, "When saw we thee?" It does not refer to the distinct cases in which virtue consists in faith given to command, appearing to foolish human judgment inconsistent with the Moral Law, as in the sacrifice of Isaac; nor to those in which any directly-given command requires nothing more of virtue than obedience.
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