approval or love for all the absolute good that he has attained,
though there be a higher good to which he aspires not; and that the
truly and rightly spiritual is he who aims at an indefinitely high
moral excellence, of which GOD is the embodiment to his heart and
soul. If the absolute excellence of morality be denied, there is
nothing for spirituality to aspire after, and nothing in God to
worship. Years before I saw this as clearly as here stated; the
general train of thought was very wholesome, in giving me increased
kindliness of judgment towards the common world of men, who do not
show any religious development. It was pleasant to me to look on
an ordinary face, and see it light up into a smile, and think with
myself: "_there_ is one heart that will judge of me by what I am, and
not by a Procrustean dogma." Nor only so, but I saw that the saints,
without the world, would make a very bad world of it; and that as
ballast is wanted to a ship, so the common and rather low interests
and the homely principles, rules, and ways of feeling, keep the church
from foundering by the intensity of her own gusts.

Some of the above thoughts took a still more definite shape, as
follows. It is clear that A. B. and X. Y. would have behaved towards
me more kindly, more justly, and more wisely, if they had consulted
their excellent strong sense and amiable natures, instead of following
(what they suppose to be) the commands of the word of God. They have
misinterpreted that word: true: but this very thing shows, that one
may go wrong by trusting one's power of interpreting the book,
rather than trusting one's common sense to judge without the book.
It startled me to find, that I had exactly alighted on the Romish
objection to Protestants, that an infallible book is useless, unless
we have an infallible interpreter. But it was not for some time, that,
after twisting the subject in all directions to avoid it, I brought