last position, whilst he as inevitably advances; and presently the
unbeliever, for love of belief, burns the believer.

Great believers are always reckoned infidels, impracticable, fantastic,
atheistic, and really men of no account. The spiritualist finds himself
driven to express his faith by a series of skepticisms. Charitable
souls come with their projects, and ask his cooperation. How can he
hesitate? It is the rule of mere comity and courtesy to agree where
you can, and to turn your sentence with something auspicious, and not
freezing and sinister. But he is forced to say, "O, these things will
be as they must be: what can you do? These particular griefs and crimes
are the foliage and fruit of such trees as we see growing. It is vain
to complain of the leaf or the berry: cut it off; it will bear another
just as bad. You must begin your cure lower down." The generosities
of the day prove an intractable element for him. The people's questions
are not his; their methods are not his; and, against all the dictates
of good nature, he is driven to say, he has no pleasure in them.

Even the doctrines dear to the hope of man, of the divine Providence,
and of the immortality of the soul, his neighbors cannot put the
statement so that he shall affirm it. But he denies out of more faith,
and not less. He denies out of honesty. He had rather stand charged
with the imbecility of skepticism, than with untruth. I believe, he
says, in the moral design of the universe; it exists hospitably for
the weal of the souls; but your dogmas seem to me caricatures; why
should I make believe them? Will any say, this is cold and infidel?
The wise and magnanimous will not say so. They will exult in his
far-sighted good-will, that can abandon to the adversary all the ground
of tradition and common belief, without losing a jot of strength. It
sees to the end of all transgression. George Fox saw "that there was