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Sir Walter Raleigh and His Time by Charles Kingsley
page 10 of 107 (09%)
understanding not only Raleigh and Elizabeth, but nine-tenths of the
persons and facts in his day, because they will not judge them by the
canons which the Bible lays down--by which I mean not only the New
Testament but the Old, which, as English Churchmen say, and Scotch
Presbyterians have ere now testified with sacred blood, is 'not
contrary to the New.'

Mr. Napier has a passage about Raleigh for which I am sorry, coming
as it does from a countryman of John Knox. 'Society, it would seem,
was yet in a state in which such a man could seriously plead, that
the madness he feigned was justified' (his last word is unfair, for
Raleigh only hopes that it is no sin) 'by the example of David, King
of Israel.' What a shocking state of society when men actually
believed their Bibles, not too little, but too much. For my part, I
think that if poor dear Raleigh had considered the example of David a
little more closely, he need never have feigned madness at all; and
that his error lay quite in an opposite direction from looking on the
Bible heroes, David especially, as too sure models. At all events,
let us try Raleigh by the very scriptural standard which he himself
lays down, not merely in this case unwisely, but in his 'History of
the World' more wisely than any historian whom I have ever read; and
say, 'Judged as the Bible taught our Puritan forefathers to judge
every man, the character is intelligible enough; tragic, but noble
and triumphant: judged as men have been judged in history for the
last hundred years, by hardly any canon save those of the private
judgment, which philosophic cant, maudlin sentimentality, or fear of
public opinion, may happen to have forged, the man is a phenomenon,
only less confused, abnormal, suspicious than his biographers'
notions about him.' Again I say, I have not solved the problem: but
it will be enough if I make some think it both soluble and worth
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