This collection of notes is not about the news of the day, and so it’s not about Donald Trump, the former president who was arraigned in New York. The news has been all about Trump.
Instead of following the news, I’ve been thinking about old news: Joseph Addison’s piece on “Sir Roger at Church,” published in 1711.
The essay is about the value of customs and customary institutions, including the law. It’s about respect for those things.
It’s about — regardless of one’s views of the gods — the value of gathering regularly as a community, making an occasion of it, breaking out the best clothes, talking to neighbors, being reminded of one’s duties to God and man.
It’s about people who uphold common values, customs and laws, rather than break them, ridicule them, show contempt for them.
Sir Roger was no hero. He was the kind of churchmen who nudged his neighbor awake during the sermon — after he had woken up from his nap.
Sir Roger was a flawed example, but he was not a bad example, as some of the other squires who showed nothing but contempt for the quaint old ways of the common people.
Addison said ordinary people needed good examples, however flawed.
Ordinary people are “so used to be dazzled with riches, that they pay as much deference to the understanding of a man of estate, as of a man of learning.”
Addison feared that ordinary folks would look up to a disastrously ignorant, arrogant man just because he was rich, rather than listen to the counsel of someone who made it his business to understand the difficult problems we face in common.
But that’s old news from an old, dead newspaper.
• Source: The Spectator, No. 112, Sept. 7, 1711. My copy is in Sir Roger de Coverley: Essays from the Spectator by Addison and Steele; New York: The MacMillan Company, 1918. The edition was part of MacMillan’s Pocket Classics and was edited by Zelma Gray, instructor of English at the East Side High School, Saginaw, Mich. I’m a great lover of books that fit in a pocket.
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