In regard to Transcendentalism again, there was reason to rejoice in having found a friend, so firm to keep her own ground, while so liberal to comprehend another’s stand-point, as was Margaret.  She knew, not only theoretically, but practically, how endless are the diversities of human character and of Divine discipline, and she reverenced fellow-spirits too sincerely ever to wish to warp them to her will, or to repress their normal development.  She was stern but in one claim, that each should be faithful to apparent leadings of the Truth; and could avow widest differences of conviction without feeling that love was thereby chilled, or the hand withheld from cordial aid.  Especially did she render service by enabling one,—­through her blended insight, candor, and clearness of understanding,—­to see in bright reflection his own mental state.

It would be doing injustice to a person like Margaret, always more enthusiastic than philosophical, to attribute to her anything like a system of theology; for, hopeful, reverent, aspiring, and free from scepticism, she felt too profoundly the vastness of the universe and of destiny ever to presume that with her span rule she could measure the Infinite.  Yet the tendency of her thoughts can readily be traced in the following passages from note-books and letters:—­

’When others say to me, and not without apparent ground, that “the Outward Church is a folly which keeps men from enjoying the communion of the Church Invisible, and that in the desire to be helped by, and to help others, men lose sight of the only sufficient help, which they might find by faithful solitary intentness of spirit,” I answer it is true, and the present deadness and emptiness summon us to turn our thoughts in that direction.  Being now without any positive form of religion, any unattractive symbols, or mysterious rites, we are in the less danger of stopping at surfaces, of accepting a mediator instead of the Father, a sacrament instead of the Holy Ghost.  And when I see how little there is to impede and bewilder us, I cannot but accept,—­should it be for many years,—­the forlornness, the want of fit expression, the darkness as to what is to be expressed, even that characterize our time.

’But I do not, therefore, as some of our friends do, believe that it will always be so, and that the church is tottering to its grave, never to rise again.  The church was the growth of human nature, and it is so still.  It is but one result of the impulse which makes two friends clasp one another’s hands, look into one another’s eyes at sight of beauty, or the utterance of a feeling of piety.  So soon as the Spirit has mourned and sought, and waited long enough to open new depths, and has found something to express, there will again be a Cultus, a Church.  The very people, who say that none is needed, make one at once.  They talk with, they write to one another.  They listen to music, they sustain themselves with the poets;