ith a man for
sixpence; but your religious dogmas, which make out that everyman
comes into the world equally brutish and fiendish, make you afraid
to confess it. I don't quarrel with a "douce" man like you, with a
large organ of veneration, for following your bent. But if I am
fiery, with a huge cerebellum, why am I not to follow mine?--For
that is what you do, after all--what you like best. It is all very
easy for a man to talk of conquering his appetites, when he has none
to conquer. Try and conquer your organ of veneration, or of
benevolence, or of calculation--then I will call you an ascetic.
Why not!--The same Power which made the front of one's head made the
back, I suppose?

'And, I tell you, hunting does me good. It awakens me out of my
dreary mill-round of metaphysics. It sweeps away that infernal web
of self-consciousness, and absorbs me in outward objects; and my
red-hot Perillus's bull cools in proportion as my horse warms. I
tell you, I never saw a man who could cut out his way across country
who could not cut his way through better things when his turn came.
The cleverest and noblest fellows are sure to be the best riders in
the long run. And as for bad company and "the world," when you take
to going in the first-class carriages for fear of meeting a swearing
sailor in the second-class--when those who have "renounced the
world" give up buying and selling in the funds--when my uncle, the
pious banker, who will only "associate" with the truly religious,
gives up dealing with any scoundrel or heathen who can "do business"
with him--then you may quote pious people's opinions to me. In
God's name, if the Stock Exchange, and railway stagging, and the
advertisements in the Protestant Hue-and-Cry, and the frantic
Mammon-hunting which has been for the last fifty years the peculiar
pursuit of the majority of Quakers, Dissenters, and Religious
Churchmen, are not The World, what is? I don't complain of them,
though; Puritanism has interdicted to them all art, all excitement,
all amusement--except money-making. It is their dernier ressort,
poor souls!

'But you must explain to us naughty fox-hunters how all this agrees
with the good book. We see plainly enough, in the meantime, how it
agrees with "poor human nature." We see that the "religious world,"
like the "great world," and the "sporting world," and the "literary
world,"

"Compounds for sins she is inclined