rstood and
his best actions perverted and distorted into crimes, he can still hold
on his way and patiently abide the hour when "the whirligig of Time shall
bring about its revenges;" if, on the whole, he is prepared to be looked
upon as a sort of moral outlaw or social heretic, under good society's
interdict of food and fire; and if he is well assured that he can,
through all this, preserve his cheerfulness and faith in man,--let him
gird up his loins and go forward in God's name. He is fitted for his
vocation; he has watched all night by his armor. Whatever his trial may
be, he is prepared; he may even be happily disappointed in respect to it;
flowers of unexpected refreshing may overhang the hedges of his strait
and narrow way; but it remains to be true that he who serves his
contemporaries in faithfulness and sincerity must expect no wages from
their gratitude; for, as has been well said, there is, after all, but one
way of doing the world good, and unhappily that way the world does not
like; for it consists in telling it the very thing which it does not wish
to hear.

Unhappily, in the case of the reformer, his most dangerous foes are those
of his own household. True, the world's garden has become a desert and
needs renovation; but is his own little nook weedless? Sin abounds
without; but is his own heart pure? While smiting down the giants and
dragons which beset the outward world, are there no evil guests sitting
by his own hearth-stone? Ambition, envy, self-righteousness, impatience,
dogmatism, and pride of opinion stand at his door-way ready to enter
whenever he leaves it unguarded. Then, too, there is no small danger of
failing to discriminate between a rational philanthropy, with its
adaptation of means to ends, and that spiritual knight-errantry which
undertakes the championship of every novel project of reform, scouring
the world in search of distressed schemes held in durance by common sense
and vagaries happily spellbound by ridicule. He must learn that,
although the most needful truth may be unpopular, it does not follow that
unpopularity is a proof of the truth of his doctrines or the expediency
of his measures. He must have the liberality to admit that it is barely
possible for the public on some points to be right and himself wrong, and
that the blessing invoked upon those who suffer for righteousness is not
available to such as court persecution and invite contempt; for folly has
its martyrs