reek: pasa ge taphos]?

177. I do not doubt but that the first automatic impulse of all our
automatic friends here present, on hearing this sentence, will be
strenuously to deny the accuracy of my definition of the aims of modern
English education. Without attempting to defend it, I would only observe
that this automatic development of solar caloric in scientific minds
must be grounded on an automatic sensation of injustice done to the
members of the School Board, as well as to many other automatically
well-meaning and ingenious persons; and that this sense of the
injuriousness and offensiveness of my definition cannot possibly have
any other basis (if I may be permitted to continue my professional
similitudes) than the fallen remnants and goodly stones, not one now
left on another, but still forming an unremovable cumulus of ruin, and
eternal Birs Nimroud, as it were, on the site of the old belfry of
Christian morality, whose top looked once so like touching Heaven.

For no offence could be taken at my definition, unless traceable to
adamantine conviction,--that ugliness, however indefinable, envy,
however natural, and cowardice, however commercially profitable, are
nevertheless eternally disgraceful; contrary, that is to say, to the
grace of our Lord Christ, if there be among us any Christ; to the grace
of the King's Majesty, if there be among us any King; and to the grace
even of Christless and Kingless Manhood, if there be among us any
Manhood.

To this fixed conception of a difference between Better and Worse, or,
when carried to the extreme, between good and evil in conduct, we all,
it seems to me, instinctively and, therefore, rightly, attach the term
of Moral sense;--the sense, for instance, that it would be better if the
members of this Society who are usually automatically absent were,
instead, automatically present; or better, that this Paper, if (which
is, perhaps, too likely) it be thought automatically impertinent, had
been made by the molecular action of my cerebral particles, pertinent.

178. Trusting, therefore, without more ado, to the strength of rampart
in this Old Sarum of the Moral sense, however subdued into vague banks
under the modern steam-plough, I will venture to suppose the first of my
two questions to have been answered by the choice on the part at least
of a majority of our Council, of the third direction of development
above specified as being the properly called "moral" one; and w