So it is that in all the quiet bays which indent the shores of the great ocean of thought, at every sinking wharf, we see moored the hulks and the razees of enslaved or half-enslaved intelligences.  They rock peacefully as children in their cradles on the subdued swell that comes feebly in over the bar at the harbor’s mouth, slowly crusting with barnacles, pulling at their iron cables as if they really wanted to be free, but better contented to remain bound as they are.  For these no more the round unwalled horizon of the open sea, the joyous breeze aloft, the furrow, the foam, the sparkle that track the rushing keel!  They have escaped the dangers of the wave, and lie still henceforth, evermore.  Happiest of souls, if lethargy is bliss, and palsy the chief beatitude!

America owes its political freedom to religious Protestantism.  But political freedom is reacting on religious prescription with still mightier force.  We wonder, therefore, when we find a soul which was born to a full sense of individual liberty, an unchallenged right of self-determination on every new alleged truth offered to its intelligence, voluntarily surrendering any portion of its liberty to a spiritual dictatorship which always proves to rest, in the last analysis, on a majority vote, nothing more nor less, commonly an old one, passed in those barbarous times when men cursed and murdered each other for differences of opinion, and of course were not in a condition to settle the beliefs of a comparatively civilized community.

In our disgust, we are liable to be intolerant.  We forget that weakness is not in itself a sin.  We forget that even cowardice may call for our most lenient judgment, if it spring from innate infirmity.  Who of us does not look with great tenderness on the young chieftain in the “Fair Maid of Perth,” when he confesses his want of courage?  All of us love companionship and sympathy; some of us may love them too much.  All of us are more or less imaginative in our theology.  Some of us may find the aid of material symbols a comfort, if not a necessity.  The boldest thinker may have his moments of languor and discouragement, when he feels as if he could willingly exchange faiths with the old beldame crossing herself at the cathedral-door,—­nay, that, if he could drop all coherent thought, and lie in the flowery meadow with the brown-eyed solemnly unthinking cattle, looking up to the sky, and all their simple consciousness staining itself blue, then down to the grass, and life turning to a mere greenness, blended with confused scents of herbs,—­no individual mind-movement such as men are teased with, but the great calm cattle-sense of all time and all places that know the milky smell of herds,—­if he could be like these, he would be content to be driven home by the cow-boy, and share the grassy banquet of the king of ancient Babylon.  Let us be very generous, then, in our judgment of those who leave the front ranks of thought