He has gravely noted down in his diary that he once
committed the sin of drinking coffee on Good Friday. In Scotland, he
thought it was his duty to pass several months without joining in
public worship, solely because the ministers of the kirk had not been
ordained by bishops. His mode of estimating the piety of his neighbours
was somewhat singular. "Campbell," said he, "is a good man, a pious man.
I am afraid he has not been in the inside of a church for many years,
but he never passes a church without pulling off his hat: this shows he
has good principles." Spain and Sicily must surely contain many pious
robbers and well-principled assassins. Johnson could easily see that a
Roundhead who named all his children after Solomon's singers, and talked
in the House of Commons about seeking the Lord, might be an unprincipled
villain whose religious mummeries only aggravated his guilt; but a man
who took off his hat when he passed a church episcopally consecrated
must be a good man, a pious man, a man of good principles. Johnson could
easily see that those persons who looked on a dance or a laced waistcoat
as sinful deemed most ignobly of the attributes of God and of the ends
of revelation; but with what a storm of invective he would have
overwhelmed any man who had blamed him for celebrating the redemption of
mankind with sugarless tea and butterless buns!.
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