emporary godhead lay more in the way of observing
than healing their infirmities, we were content to pass them by in
scorn.

I could not leave my companion, not from regard or even from interest,
but from a very natural feeling, inseparable from the case. To
understand it, let us take a simile. Suppose yourself walking down the
street with a man who continues to sprinkle the crowd out of a flask of
vitriol. You would be much diverted with the grimaces and contortions of
his victims; and at the same time you would fear to leave his arm until
his bottle was empty, knowing that, when once among the crowd, you would
run a good chance yourself of baptism with his biting liquor. Now my
companion's vitriol was inexhaustible.

It was perhaps the consciousness of this, the knowledge that I was being
anointed already out of the vials of his wrath, that made me fall to
criticising the critic, whenever we had parted.

After all, I thought, our satirist has just gone far enough into his
neighbours to find that the outside is false, without caring to go
farther and discover what is really true. He is content to find that
things are not what they seem, and broadly generalises from it that they
do not exist at all. He sees our virtues are not what they pretend they
are; and, on the strength of that, he denies us the possession of virtue
altogether. He has learnt the first lesson, that no man is wholly good;
but he has not even suspected that there is another equally true, to
wit, that no man is wholly bad. Like the inmate of a coloured star, he
has eyes for one colour alone. He has a keen scent after evil, but his
nostrils are plugged against all good, as people plugged their nostrils
before going about the streets of the plague-struck city.

Why does he do this? It is most unreasonable to flee the knowledge of
good like the infection of a horrible disease, and batten and grow fat
in the real atmosphere of a lazar-house. This was my first thought; but
my second was not like unto it, and I saw that our satirist was wise,
wise in his generation, like the unjust steward. He does not want
light, because the darkness is more pleasant. He does not wish to see
the good, because he is happier without it. I recollect that when I
walked with him, I was in a state of divine exaltation, such as Adam and
Eve must have enjoyed when the savour of the fruit was still unfaded
between their lips; and I recognise that this must be the man's habitual