Speech delivered at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington Butts, London on 24th May 1870. See Education in India for major portion of the speech.
“The book trade invented literary prizes to stimulate sales, not to reward merit.”
"The Great Good Man" (1802).
Context: How seldom, friend! a good great man inherits
Honor or wealth, with all his worth and pains!
It sounds like stories from the land of spirits
If any man obtain that which he merits,
Or any merit that which he obtains.
.........
Greatness and goodness are not means, but ends!
Hath he not always treasures, always friends,
The good great man? Three treasures,—love and light,
And calm thoughts, regular as infants' breath;
And three firm friends, more sure than day and night,—
Himself, his Maker, and the angel Death.
“Even here, merit will have its true reward…
even here, the world is a world of tears
and the burdens of mortality touch the heart.”
Sunt hic etiam sua praemia laudi,
Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.
Source: Aeneid (29–19 BC), Book I, Lines 461–462 (tr. Robert Fagles)
Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.8
“There is merit without attainment, but no attainment without some merit.”
Il y a du mérite sans élévation, mais il n'y a point d'élévation sans quelque mérite.
Maxim 400.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)
Source: A Mother's Advice to Her Son, 1726, p. 139
Source: Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871), Ch. III : The Master, p. 70
Context: Justice in no wise consists in meting out to another that exact measure of reward or punishment which we think and decree his merit, or what we call his crime, which is more often merely his error, deserves. The justice of the father is not incompatible with forgiveness by him of the errors and offences of his child. The Infinite Justice of God does not consist in meting out exact measures of punishment for human frailties and sins. We are too apt to erect our own little and narrow notions of what is right and just, into the law of justice, and to insist that God shall adopt that as His law; to measure off something with our own little tape-line, and call it God's law of justice. Continually we seek to ennoble our own ignoble love of revenge and retaliation, by misnaming it justice.
Source: The Moral Judgment of the Child (1932), Ch. 3 Cooperation and the Idea of Justice <!-- p. 197 -->
Context: There are in existence two distinct ideas of justice. We say that an award is unjust when it penalizes the innocent, rewards the guilty, or when, in general, it fails to be meted out in exact proportion to the merit or guilt in question. On the other hand, we say that a division is unjust when it favors some at the expense of others. In this second adaptation of the term, the idea of justice implies only the idea of equality. In the first acceptation of the term, the notion of justice is inseparable from that of the reward and punishment, and is defined by the correlation between acts and their retribution.
