The very aim and end of our institutions is just this:  that we may think what we like and say what we think.

—­Think what we like!—­said the divinity-student;—­think what we like!  What! against all human and divine authority?

Against all human versions of its own or any other authority.  At our own peril always, if we do not like the right,—­but not at the risk of being hanged and quartered for political heresy, or broiled on green fagots for ecclesiastical treason!  Nay, we have got so far, that the very word heresy has fallen into comparative disuse among us.

And now, my young friend, let-us shake hands and stop our discussion, which we will not make a quarrel.  I trust you know, or will learn, a great many things in your profession which we common scholars do not know; but mark this:  when the common people of New England stop talking politics and theology, it will be because they have got an Emperor to teach them the one, and a Pope to teach them the other!

That was the end of my long conference with the divinity-student.  The next morning we got talking a little on the same subject, very good-naturedly, as people return to a matter they have talked out.

You must look to yourself,—­said the divinity-student,—­if your democratic notions get into print.  You will be fired into from all quarters.

If it were only a bullet, with the marksman’s name on it!—­I said.—­I can’t stop to pick out the peep-shot of the anonymous scribblers.

Right, Sir! right!—­said the Little Gentleman.  The scamps!  I know the fellows.  They can’t give fifty cents to one of the Antipodes, but they must have it jingled along through everybody’s palms all the way, till it reaches him,—­and forty cents of it gets spilt, like the water out of the fire-buckets passed along a “lane” at a fire;—­but when it comes to anonymous defamation, putting lies into people’s mouths, and then advertising those people through the country as the authors of them,—­oh, then it is that they let not their left hand know what their right hand doeth!

I don’t like Ehud’s style of doing business, Sir.  He comes along with a very sanctimonious look, Sir, with his “secret errand unto thee,” and his “message from God unto thee,” and then pulls out his hidden knife with that unsuspected hand of his,—–­(the Little Gentleman lifted his clenched left hand with the blood-red jewel on the ring-finger,)—­and runs it, blade and haft, into a man’s stomach!  Don’t meddle with these fellows, Sir.  They are read mostly by persons whom you would not reach, if you were to write ever so much.  Let ’em alone.  A man whose opinions are not attacked is beneath contempt.