The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (Penguin Classics)

by Laurence Sterne

  “Another is sordid, unmerciful, (here Trim waved his right hand) a strait-hearted, selfish wretch, incapable either of private friendship or publick spirit. Take notice how he passes by the widow and orphan in their distress, and sees all the miseries incident to human life without a sigh or a prayer.” [And please your Honours, cried Trim, I think this is a viler man than the other.]

  “Shall not conscience rise up and sting him on such oc-casions?——No; thank God there is no occasion; I pay every man his own;—I have no fornication to answer to my conscience;—no faithless vows or promises to make up;—I have debauched no man’s wife or child; thank God, I am not as other men, adulterers, unjust, or even as this libertine, who stands before me. 16

  “A third is crafty and designing in his nature. View his whole life;——’tis nothing but a cunning contexture of dark arts and unequitable subterfuges, basely to defeat the true intent of all laws,—plain dealing and the safe enjoyment of our several properties.——You will see such a one working out a frame of little designs upon the ignorance and perplexities of the poor and needy man;—shall raise a fortune upon the inexperience of a youth, or the unsuspecting temper of his friend who would have trusted him with his life.

  “When old age comes on, and repentance calls him to look back upon this black account, and state it over again with his conscience,——CONSCIENCE looks into the STATUTES at LARGE;—finds no express law broken by what he has done;— perceives no penalty or forfeiture of goods and chattels incurred; ––sees no scourge waving over his head, or prison opening his gates upon him:—What is there to affright his conscience?— Conscience has got safely entrenched behind the Letter of the Law;17 sits there invulnerable, fortified with Cafes and Reports so strongly on all sides,—that it is not preaching can dispossess it of its hold.”

  [Here Corporal Trim and my uncle Toby exchanged looks with each other.––Aye,—aye, Trim! quoth my uncle Toby, shaking his head,—these are but sorry fortifications, Trim. ——O! very poor work, answered Trim, to what your Honour and I make of it.——The character of this last man, said Dr. Slop, interrupting Trim, is more detestable than all the rest;—and seems to have been taken from some pettifogging Lawyer amongst you:—Amongst us a man’s conscience could not possibly continue so long blinded;—three times in a year, at least, he must go to confession. Will that restore it to sight, quoth my uncle Toby?— Go on, Trim, quoth my father, or Obadiah will have got back before thou hast got to the end of thy sermon;— ’tis a very short one, replied Trim.—I wish it was longer, quoth my uncle Toby, for I like it hugely.— Trim went on.]

  “A fourth man shall want even this refuge;—shall break through all this ceremony of slow chicane;——scorns the doubtful workings of secret plots and cautious trains to bring about his purpose:—See the bare-faced villain, how he cheats, lies, perjures, robs, murders.——Horrid!——But indeed much better was not to be expected, in the present case,—the poor man was in the dark!—his priest had got the keeping of his conscience;—and all he would let him know of it, was, That he must believe in the Pope;—go to Mass;—cross himself;—tell his beads;—be a good Catholick, and that this, in all conscience, was enough to carry him to heaven. What;—if he perjures!— Why;—he had a mental reservation18 in it.—But if he is so wicked and abandoned a wretch as you represent him;—if he robs,—if he stabs,——will not conscience, on every such act, receive a wound itself? Aye,—but the man has carried it to confession;—the wound digests there,19 and will do well enough, and in a short time be quite healed up by absolution. O Popery! what hast thou to answer for?—when, not content with the too many natural and fatal ways, thro’ which the heart of man is every day thus treacherous to itself above all things;20—thou hast wilfully set open this wide gate of deceit before the face of this unwary traveller, too apt, God knows, to go astray of himself; and confidently speak peace to himself, when there is no peace.21

  “Of this the common instances which I have drawn out of life, are too notorious to require much evidence. If any man doubts the reality of them, or thinks it impossible for a man to be such a bubble to himself,—I must refer him a moment to his own reflections, and will then venture to trust my appeal with his own heart.

  “Let him consider in how different a degree of detestation, numbers of wicked actions stand there, tho’ equally bad and vicious in their own natures;—he will soon find that such of them, as strong inclination and custom have prompted him to commit, are generally dress’d out and painted with all the false beauties, which a soft and a flattering hand can give them;— and that the others, to which he feels no propensity, appear, at once, naked and deformed, surrounded with all the true circumstances of folly and dishonour.22

  “When David surprized Saul sleeping in the cave, and cut off the skirt of his robe,—we read his heart smote him for what he had done:—But in the matter of Uriah, where a faithful and gallant servant, whom he ought to have loved and honoured, fell to make way for his lust,—where conscience had so much greater reason to take the alarm, his heart smote him not. A whole year had almost passed from the first commission of that crime, to the time Nathan was sent to reprove him; and we read not once of the least sorrow or compunction of heart which he testified, during all that time, for what he had done.23

  “Thus conscience, this once able monitor,—placed on high as a judge within us, and intended by our maker as a just and equitable one too,—by an unhappy train of causes and impediments, takes often such imperfect cognizance of what passes,—does its office so negligently,—sometimes so corruptly,—that it is not to be trusted alone; and therefore we find there is a necessity, an absolute necessity of joining another principle with it to aid, if not govern, its determinations.

  “So that if you would form a just judgment of what is of infinite importance to you not to be misled in,——namely, in what degree of real merit you stand either as an honest man, an useful citizen, a faithful subject to your King, or a good servant to your God,––call in religion and morality.—Look,––What is written in the law of God?—How readest thou?——Consult calm reason and the unchangeable obligations of justice and truth;—what say they?24

  “Let CONSCIENCE determine the matter upon these reports;—and then if thy heart condemns thee not, which is the case the Apostle supposes,—the rule will be infallible, (here Dr. Slop fell asleep) thou wilt have confidence towards God;25— that is, have just grounds to believe the judgment thou hast past upon thyself, is the judgment of God; and nothing else but an anticipation of that righteous sentence which will be pronounced upon thee hereafter by that Being, to whom thou art finally to give an account of thy actions.

  “Blessed is the man, indeed then, as the author of the book of Ecclesiasticus expresses it, who is not prick’d with the multitude of his sins: Blessed is the man whose heart hath not condemn’d him; whether he be rich, or whether he be poor, if he have a good heart, (a heart thus guided and informed) he shall at all times rejoice in a chearful countenance; his mind shall tell him more than seven watch-men that sit above upon a tower on high. 26——[A tower has no strength, quoth my uncle Toby, unless ’tis flank’d.] In the darkest doubts it shall conduct him safer than a thousand casuists, and give the state he lives in a better security for his behaviour than all the clauses and restrictions put together, which law-makers are forced to multiply:— Forced, I say, as things stand; human laws not being a matter of original choice, but of pure necessity, brought in to fence against the mischievous effects of those consciences which are no law unto themselves; well intending, by the many provisions made,—that in all such corrupt and misguided cases, where principles and the checks of conscience will not make us upright,—to supply their force, and, by the terrors of gaols and halters, oblige us to it.”

  [I see plainly, said my father, that this sermon has been composed to be preach’d at the Temple,27—or at some Assize.—

  I like the reasoning,—and am sorry that Dr. Slop has fallen asleep before the time of his conv
iction;—for it is now clear, that the Parson, as I thought at first, never insulted St. Paul in the least;—nor has there been, brother, the least difference between them.—A great matter, if they had differed, replied my uncle Toby,—the best friends in the world may differ sometimes.—True,—brother Toby, quoth my father, shaking hands with him,—we’ll fill our pipes, brother, and then Trim shall go on.

  Well,—what do’st thou think of it? said my father, speaking to Corporal Trim, as he reach’d his tobacco-box.

  I think, answered the Corporal, that the seven watch-men upon the tower, who, I suppose, are all centinels there,—are more, an’ please your Honour, than were necessary;—and, to go on at that rate, would harrass a regiment all to pieces, which a commanding officer, who loves his men, will never do, if he can help it; because two centinels, added the Corporal, are as good as twenty.—I have been a commanding officer myself in the Corps de Garde 28 a hundred times, continued Trim, rising an inch higher in his figure, as he spoke,——and all the time I had the honour to serve his Majesty King William, in relieving the most considerable posts, I never left more than two in my life.——Very right, Trim, quoth my uncle Toby;—but you do not consider Trim, that the towers, in Solomon’s days, were not such things as our bastions, flank’d and defended by other works;—this, Trim, was an invention since Solomon’s death; nor had they horn-works, or ravelins before the curtin, in his time;—or such a fossé as we make with a cuvette in the middle of it, and with cover’d-ways and counterscarps pallisadoed along it, to guard against a Coup de main: 29—So that the seven men upon the tower were a party, I dare say, from the Corps de Garde, set there, not only to look out, but to defend it.—They could be no more, an’ please your Honour, than a Corporal’s Guard.—My father smiled inwardly,—but not outwardly;— the subject between my uncle Toby and Corporal Trim being rather too serious, considering what had happened, to make a jest of:—So, putting his pipe into his mouth, which he had just lighted,—he contented himself with ordering Trim to read on. He read on as follows:]

  “To have the fear of God before our eyes, and, in our mutual dealings with each other, to govern our actions by the eternal measures of right and wrong:—The first of these will comprehend the duties of religion;——the second, those of morality, which are so inseparably connected together, that you cannot divide these two tables,30 even in imagination, (tho’ the attempt is often made in practice) without breaking and mutually destroying them both.

  “I said the attempt is often made, and so it is;—there being nothing more common than to see a man who has no sense at all of religion,——and indeed has so much honesty as to pretend to none, who would take it as the bitterest affront, should you but hint at a suspicion of his moral character,––or imagine he was not conscientiously just and scrupulous to the uttermost mite.

  “When there is some appearance that it is so,—tho’ one is unwilling even to suspect the appearance of so amiable a virtue as moral honesty, yet were we to look into the grounds of it, in the present case, I am persuaded we should find little reason to envy such a one the honour of his motive.

  “Let him declaim as pompously as he chooses upon the subject, it will be found to rest upon no better foundation than either his interest, his pride, his ease, or some such little and changeable passion as will give us but small dependence upon his actions in matters of great stress.

  “I will illustrate this by an example.

  “I know the banker I deal with, or the physician I usually call in [there is no need, cried Dr. Slop, (waking) to call in any physician in this case] to be neither of them men of much religion: I hear them make a jest of it every day, and treat all its sanctions with so much scorn, as to put the matter past doubt. Well;—notwithstanding this, I put my fortune into the hands of the one;—and, what is dearer still to me, I trust my life to the honest skill of the other.

  “Now, let me examine what is my reason for this great confidence.——Why, in the first place, I believe there is no probability that either of them will employ the power I put into their hands to my disadvantage;—I consider that honesty serves the purposes of this life:—I know their success in the world depends upon the fairness of their characters.—In a word,—I’m persuaded that they cannot hurt me, without hurting themselves more.

  “But put it otherwise, namely, that interest lay, for once, on the other side; that a case should happen, wherein the one, without stain to his reputation, could secrete my fortune, and leave me naked in the world;—or that the other could send me out of it, and enjoy an estate by my death, without dishonour to himself or his art:—In this case, what hold have I of either of them?—Religion, the strongest of all motives, is out of the question:—Interest, the next most powerful motive in the world, is strongly against me:—What have I left to cast into the opposite scale to balance this temptation?––Alas! I have nothing,— nothing but what is lighter than a bubble.—I must lay at the mercy of HONOUR, or some such capricious principle.—— Strait security for two of my most valuable blessings!—my property and my life.31

  “As, therefore, we can have no dependence upon morality without religion;—so, on the other hand, there is nothing better to be expected from religion without morality;—nevertheless, ’tis no prodigy to see a man whose real moral character stands very low, who yet entertains the highest notion of himself, in the light of a religious man.

  “He shall not only be covetous, revengeful, implacable,—— but even wanting in points of common honesty; yet, inasmuch as he talks aloud against the infidelity of the age,—is zealous for some points of religion,——goes twice a day to church,— attends the sacraments,—and amuses himself with a few instrumental parts of religion,32—shall cheat his conscience into a judgment that, for this, he is a religious man, and has discharged truly his duty to God: And you will find that such a man, thro’ force of this delusion, generally looks down with spiritual pride upon every other man who has less affectation of piety,––tho’, perhaps, ten times more moral honesty than himself.

  “This likewise is a sore evil under the sun;33 and I believe there is no one mistaken principle which, for its time, has wrought more serious mischiefs.—For a general proof of this,— examine the history of the Romish Church;34—[Well, what can you make of that, cried Dr. Slop? ]—see what scenes of cruelty, murders, rapines, blood-shed, [They may thank their own obstinacy, cried Dr. Slop] have all been sanctified by a religion not strictly governed by morality.

  “In how many kingdoms of the world, [Here Trim kept waving his right hand from the sermon to the extent of his arm, returning it backwards and forwards to the conclusion of the paragraph.]

  “In how many kingdoms of the world has the crusading sword of this misguided saint-errant35 spared neither age, or merit, or sex, or condition?—and, as he fought under the banners of a religion which set him loose from justice and humanity, he shew’d none; mercilessly trampled upon both, ——heard neither the cries of the unfortunate, nor pitied their distresses.”

  [I have been in many a battle, an’ please your Honour, quoth Trim, sighing, but never in so melancholy a one as this.—I would not have drawn a tricker36 in it, against these poor souls, ——to have been made a general officer.—Why, what do you understand of the affair? said Doctor Slop, looking towards Trim with something more contempt37 than the Corporal’s honest heart deserved.—What do you know, friend, about this battle you talk of?——I know, replied Trim, that I never refused quarter in my life to any man who cried out for it;—but to a woman or a child, continued Trim, before I would level my musket at them, I would lose my life a thousand times.—Here’s a crown for thee, Trim, to drink with Obadiah to-night, quoth my uncle Toby, and I’ll give Obadiah another too.––God bless your Honour, replied Trim,—I had rather these poor women and children had it.—Thou art an honest fellow, quoth my uncle Toby.––––My father nodded his head,—as much as to say,—and so he is.———

  But pri’thee, Trim, said my father, make an end,�
�for I see thou hast but a leaf or two left.]

  Corporal Trim read on.

  “If the testimony of past centuries in this matter is not sufficient,——consider, at this instant, how the votaries of that religion are every day thinking to do service and honour to God, by actions which are a dishonour and scandal to themselves.

  “To be convinced of this, go with me for a moment into the prisons of the inquisition. [God help my poor brother Tom.] ——Behold Religion, with Mercy and Justice chained down under her feet,——there sitting ghastly upon a black tribunal, propp’d up with racks and instruments of torment. Hark!— hark! what a piteous groan! [Here Trim’s face turned as pale as ashes.] See the melancholy wretch who utter’d it—[Here the tears began to trickle down] just brought forth to undergo the anguish of a mock trial, and endure the utmost pains that a studied system of cruelty has been able to invent.—[D—n them all, quoth Trim, his colour returning into his face as red as blood.]—Behold this helpless victim delivered up to his tormentors,——his body so wasted with sorrow and confinement— [Oh! ’tis my brother, cried poor Trim in a most passionate exclamation, dropping the sermon upon the ground, and clapping his hands together——I fear ’tis poor Tom. My father’s and my uncle Toby’s hearts yearn’d with sympathy for the poor fellow’s distress,——even Slop himself acknowledged pity for him.—Why, Trim, said my father, this is not a history,—’tis a sermon thou art reading;—pri’thee begin the sentence again.]— Behold this helpless victim deliver’d up to his tormentors,—his body so wasted with sorrow and confinement, you will see every nerve and muscle as it suffers.

  “Observe the last movement of that horrid engine! [I would rather face a cannon, quoth Trim, stamping.]——See what convulsions it has thrown him into!——Consider the nature of the posture in which he now lies stretched,—what exquisite tortures he endures by it!——[I hope ’tis not in Portugal.]38— ’Tis all nature can bear! Good God! see how it keeps his weary soul hanging upon his trembling lips! [I would not read another line of it, quoth Trim, for all this world;—I fear, an’ please your Honours, all this is in Portugal, where my poor brother Tom is. I tell thee, Trim, again, quoth my father, ’tis not an historical account,—’tis a description. — ’Tis only a description, honest man, quoth Slop, there’s not a word of truth in it.—That’s another story, replied my father.—However, as Trim reads it with so much concern,—’tis cruelty to force him to go on with it.––Give me hold of the sermon, Trim,––I’ll finish it for thee, and thou may’st go. I must stay and hear it too, replied Trim, if your Honour will allow me;—tho’ I would not read it myself for a Colonel’s pay.——Poor Trim! quoth my uncle Toby. My father went on.]