Now get thee into the secret recesses of thy closet, Rev. Lovepreach; knuckle down upon thy knees and pray to a tolerant God not to smite thee with a plague.  For lo! thou hast been a bigoted, bat-eyed, cat-hearted fraud-a preacher of peace and a practiser of strife.  For these many years thy tongue hath been dropping gospel honey, and thy soul secreting bitterness.  Thy voice has been as the sound of glad horns upon a hill, but thy ways are the ways of a gaunt hound tracking the hunted stag.  “Holier than we,” are you?  And when the worker of differing faith is gone to his account, you turn your sleek back upon the God’s-image as it is given to the waiting worms.  Perdition seize thee and thy holiness! we’ll none of it.

....  Two hundred dollars for biting a woman’s neck and arms!  That was the sentence imposed upon the gentle Mr. Hill, because His Eminence set his incisors into the yielding tissue of Mrs. Langdon, a lady with whom his wife happened to be debating by means of a stew-kettle.

If this monstrous decision stand, the writer owes the treasury about ten thousand dollars.  Though by nature of a mild and gentle appetite, preferring simple roots and herbs, yet it has been his custom to nip all female necks and arms that have been willingly submitted unto his teeth.  He hath found in this harmless, and he had supposed lawful, practice, an exceeding sweetness of sensation, and a satisfaction wherewith the delights of sausage, or the bliss of pigs’ feet, can in nowise compare.  Having commonly found the gratification mutual, he thinks he is justified in maintaining its innocence.

....  We are tolerably phlegmatic and notoriously hard to provoke.  We look on with considerable composure while our favourite Chinaman is being dismembered in the streets, and our dog publicly insulted.  Detecting an alien hand in our trousers pocket excites in us only a feeling of temperate disapprobation, and an open swindle executed upon our favourite cousin by an unscrupulous shopkeeper we regard simply as an instance of enterprise which has taken an unfortunate direction.  Slow to anger, quick to forgive, charitable in judgment and to mercy prone; with unbounded faith in the entire goodness of man and the complete holiness of woman; seeking ever for palliating circumstances in the conduct of the blackest criminal-we are at once a model of moderation and a pattern of forbearance.

But if Mrs. Victoria Woodhull and her swinish crew of free lovers had but a single body, and that body lay asleep under the upturned root of a prostrate oak, we would work with a dull jack-knife day and night-month in and month out-through summer’s sun and winter’s storm-to sever that giant trunk, and let that mighty root, clasping its mountain of inverted earth, back into the position assigned to it by nature and by nature’s God!