DOI Artikel:
Traill, Henry D.: The papers of Basil Fillimer
DOI Seite / Zitierlink:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.21806#0026
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The Papers of Basil Fillimer
pleased with my own wise humanity, as I thought it. But now
that I look back upon it and examine my mixed motives, I am
forced to admit that there was more of cowardice than compassion
in the amalgam. I was not even quite sincere, I now find, in
pleading to myself my aunt’s distress of mind as an excuse for the
concealment, or rather the misrepresentation, of my opinions. I
knew at the time that she had had a bad night and that she is suf-
fering severely just now from suppressed gout. In other words, I
was secretly conscious at the back of my mind that the abnormal
excess of her momentary sufferings was due to physical and not
mental causes, and would yield readily enough to colchicum or
salicylic acid, which no one has ever ranked among Christian
apologetics. Yet I persuaded myself for the moment that it was
this quite exceptional and transitory state of my aunt’s feelings
which compelled me to keep silence.
“ June 23.—To-day I have had what seems—or seemed to me, for
I have not yet had time for a thorough analysis—a clear indication
of my only rational and legitimate course. My aunt Catherine said
plainly to me this afternoon that as she had gathered from our
conversations that my views were strictly orthodox, she would not
pain me in future by any further disclosures of her own doubts.
At the same time, she added, it was only right to teil me that my
pious advice had done her no good, but, on the contrary, harm, since
there was to her mind nothing so calculated to confirm scepticism
as the sight of a man of good understanding thus firmly wedded
to certain received opinions of which nevertheless he was unable to
offer any reasonable defence or even intelligible explanation whatso-
ever. Upon this hint I of course spoke. It was clear that if my
silence only increased my aunt’s trouble, and that if, further, it
threatened to convict me unjustly of stupidity, I was clearly
entitled, as well on altruistic as on self-regarding grounds, to reveal
The Papers of Basil Fillimer
pleased with my own wise humanity, as I thought it. But now
that I look back upon it and examine my mixed motives, I am
forced to admit that there was more of cowardice than compassion
in the amalgam. I was not even quite sincere, I now find, in
pleading to myself my aunt’s distress of mind as an excuse for the
concealment, or rather the misrepresentation, of my opinions. I
knew at the time that she had had a bad night and that she is suf-
fering severely just now from suppressed gout. In other words, I
was secretly conscious at the back of my mind that the abnormal
excess of her momentary sufferings was due to physical and not
mental causes, and would yield readily enough to colchicum or
salicylic acid, which no one has ever ranked among Christian
apologetics. Yet I persuaded myself for the moment that it was
this quite exceptional and transitory state of my aunt’s feelings
which compelled me to keep silence.
“ June 23.—To-day I have had what seems—or seemed to me, for
I have not yet had time for a thorough analysis—a clear indication
of my only rational and legitimate course. My aunt Catherine said
plainly to me this afternoon that as she had gathered from our
conversations that my views were strictly orthodox, she would not
pain me in future by any further disclosures of her own doubts.
At the same time, she added, it was only right to teil me that my
pious advice had done her no good, but, on the contrary, harm, since
there was to her mind nothing so calculated to confirm scepticism
as the sight of a man of good understanding thus firmly wedded
to certain received opinions of which nevertheless he was unable to
offer any reasonable defence or even intelligible explanation whatso-
ever. Upon this hint I of course spoke. It was clear that if my
silence only increased my aunt’s trouble, and that if, further, it
threatened to convict me unjustly of stupidity, I was clearly
entitled, as well on altruistic as on self-regarding grounds, to reveal