Page:Hardy - Jude the Obscure, 1896.djvu/111

 the 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:

Then one of the three enthusiasts he had seen just now, the author of the Apologiat:

"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: