are as well worth saving as some of their neighbors, may, I think,
be legitimately entertained. In saying this, I mean to be neither
light or irreverent. I mean simply to indicate that some men are
worth a great deal more to themselves and to their fellows than
others.

So, when I look abroad upon the world, and see men shaving their
heads, and wearing nasty hair shirts, and shutting themselves up
in cells, and living lives of celibacy, and when I see women
retiring from the world which they were sent to adorn, populate,
and bless, and Shakers driving around in square wagons and
studiously ugly garments, and Christians who should know better
abandoning all the bright and cheerful things of life, and feeling
that there is merit in mortification, I cannot but feel that God
looks down upon it all with sadness and pity. After doing every
thing in His power to make His children happy--after filling the
world with good things for their use, and giving them abundant
faculties for enjoying them--after endowing them with beauty, and
a sense of that which is beautiful--it must be sad to Him to see
them wandering about in strange disguises, hugging to their
half-rebellious hearts the awful mistake that, however much they
may suffer, they are gaining favor thereby in the sight of their
Maker. Of course, I believe in self-denial, and in the nobility
of self-denial, for the good of others; but I believe that all
self-denial that partakes of the character of penance, in whatever
form and under whatever circumstances it may develop itself, is
always a thing of mischief, and always a thing of error. It has its
basis in the miserable theory that there is something in the
passions and appetites with which God has constituted man that is
essentially bad--a theory as impious as it is injurious--as