from sheltering me and break off intercourse, they should, as far as
his influence went, themselves everywhere be cut off from Christian
communion and recognition. This will suffice to indicate the sort of
social persecution, through which, after a succession of struggles, I
found myself separated from persons whom I had trustingly admired,
and on whom I had most counted for union: with whom I fondly believed
myself bound up for eternity; of whom some were my previously intimate
friends, while for others, even on slight acquaintance, I would have
performed menial offices and thought myself honoured; whom I still
looked upon as the blessed and excellent of the earth, and the special
favourites of heaven; whose company (though oftentimes they were
considerably my inferiors either in rank or in knowledge and
cultivation) I would have chosen in preference to that of nobles; whom
I loved solely because I thought them to love God, and of whom I asked
nothing, but that they would admit me as the meanest and most frail of
disciples. My heart was ready to break: I wished for a woman's soul,
that I might weep in floods. Oh, Dogma! Dogma! how dost them trample
under foot love, truth, conscience, justice! Was ever a Moloch worse
than thou? Burn me at the stake; then Christ will receive me, and
saints beyond the grave will love me, though the saints here know
me not But now I am alone in the world: I can trust no one. The new
acquaintances who barely tolerate me, and old friends whom reports
have not reached, (if such there be,) may turn against me with
animosity to-morrow, as those have done from whom I could least have
imagined it. Where is union? where is the Church, which was to convert
the heathen?

This was not my only reason, yet it was soon a sufficient and at last
an overwhelming reason, against returning to the East. The pertinacity
of the attacks made on me, and on all who dared to hold by me in a