farious
world, and the pursuit and chastisement of sinners the one avocation
that is permanently worth while. The product of that simple doctrine is
a character of no little vigour and austerity, and one much esteemed by
the great masses of men, who are always uneasily conscious of their own
weakness in the face of temptation and thus have a sneaking veneration
for the man apparently firm, and who are always ready to believe,
furthermore, that any man who seems to be having a pleasant time is a
rascal and deserving of the fire.

The Presbyterian likewise harbours this latter suspicion. More, he
commonly erects it into a certainty. Every single human act, he holds,
must be either right or wrong--and the overwhelming majority of them are
wrong. He knows exactly what these wrong ones are; he recognizes them
instantly and infallibly, by a sort of inspired intuition; and he
believes that they should all be punished automatically and with the
utmost severity. No one ever heard of a Presbyterian overlooking a
fault, or pleading for mercy for the erring. He would regard such an act
as the weakness of one ridden by the Devil. From such harsh judgments
and retributions, it must be added in fairness, he does not except
himself. He detects his own aberration almost as quickly as he detects
the aberration of the other fellow, and though he may sometimes
seek--being, after all, only human--to escape its consequences, he by no
means condones it. Nothing, indeed, could exceed the mental anguish of a
Presbyterian who has been betrayed, by the foul arts of some lascivious
wench, into any form of adultery, or, by the treason of his senses in
some other way, into a voluptuous yielding to the lure of the other
_beaux arts_. It has been our fortune, at various times, to be in the
confidence of Presbyterians thus seduced from their native virtue, and
we bear willing testimony to their sincere horror. Even the least pious
of them was as greatly shaken up by what to us, on our lower plane,
seemed a mere peccadillo, perhaps in bad taste but certainly not worth
getting into a sweat about, as we ourselves would have been by a gross
breach of faith.

But, as has been before remarked, the bitter must go with the sweet. In
the face of so exalted a moral passion it would be absurd to look for
that urbane habit which seeks the well-being of one's self and the other
fellow, not in exact obedience to harsh statutes, but in ease, dignity
and the more de