"The King is full of grace and fair regard.
Consideration, like an angel, came
And whipp'd the offending Adam out of him."
4. And as to Pragmatic, I would not call you a stupid person even though
you confided to me that you had never heard this footpad's name till to-
night. John Bunyan has been borrowing Latin again, and not to the
improvement of his style, or to the advantage of his readers. It would
be insufferably pragmatic in me to begin to set John Bunyan right in his
English; but I had rather offend the shades of a hundred John Bunyans
than leave my most unlettered hearer without his full and proper Sabbath-
night lesson. The third armed thief, then, that fell upon Valiant was,
under other names, Impertinence, Meddlesomeness, Officiousness,
Over-Interference. Pragmatic,--by whatever name he calls himself, there
is no mistaking him. He is never satisfied. He is never pleased. He is
never thankful. He is always setting his superiors right. He is like
the Psalmist in one thing, he has more understanding than all his
teachers. And he enjoys nothing more than in letting them know that.
There is nothing he will not correct you in--from cutting for the stone
to commanding the Channel Fleet. Now, if all that has put any visual
image of Pragmatic into your mind, you will see at once what an enemy he
too is fitted to be to the truth. For the truth does not stand in
points, but in principles. The truth does not dwell in the letter but in
the spirit. The truth is not served by setting other people right, but
by seeing every day and in every thing how far wrong we are ourselves.
The truth is like charity in this, that it begins at home. It is like
charity in this also, that it never behaves itself unseemly. A
pragmatical man, taken along with an inconsiderate man, and then a wild-
headed man added on to them, are three about as fatal hands as any truth
could fall into. The worst enemy of the truth must pity the truth, and
feel his hatred at the truth relenting, when he sees her under the
championship of Wildhead, Inconsiderate, and Pragmatic.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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