The Record is not sorry—except in a sense s —for Dean Milman.
It speaks of him with ridicule as leaving the stage amidst loud applause, like " a well-graced actor," and intimates grimly that the Dean, though gone at last, is gone to no good :—" But it is not with this life that man's being ends, and the office of a teacher of Christianity involves issues far too solemn to permit us to survey with comfort the history of the late Dean of St. Paul's. He is described as a poet, dramatist, historian, a scholar, and a man of letters. We wish, for his own sake, and for the sake of the Church, that he had not also attained to a bad eminence as a divine." His career, ends the Record, " savours of those who love the world, who are of the world, and whom the world hears. But after all, it is but a sorry portion, and whether men will hear or whether they will forbear, it is well that they should be reminded that God is not mocked." We are not exceedingly familiar with the best technical way of intimating, under decent reserves, that a man is gone into the everlasting fires ; but we suppose that to quote against a deceased person the text, " God is not mocked," is the proper and technical mode of alleging that what any one has sown, and what, therefore, he will also reap, is something to the last degree horrible. For our own parts, little as we admire that ordinary damnation which savours, as the Record says, " of the world," we prefer it to this covert way of wrapping it up in a text to make it look decent, and placarding it over an opponent's coffin.
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