d be letting you off
cheaply by naming only two or three, such as--." Here, fearing matters
would go too far, I interposed, and softening things as much as I could
for the lady, said, "I conceived that Mr. Ranby meant, that though she
partook of the general corruption--" Here Ranby, interrupting me with
more spirit than I thought he possessed, said "General corruption, sir,
must be the source of particular corruption: I did not mean that my
wife was worse than other women."--"Worse, Mr. Ranby, worse?" cried she.
Ranby, for the first time in his life, not minding her, went on, "As she
is always insisting that the whole species is corrupt, she can not help
allowing that she herself has not quite escaped the infection. Now to be
a sinner in the gross and a saint in the detail; that is, to have all
sins, and no faults, is a thing I do not quite comprehend."

After he had left the room, which he did as the shortest way of allaying
the storm, she apologized for him, said, "he was a well-meaning man, and
acted up to the little light he had;" but added, "that he was
unacquainted with religious feelings, and knew little of the nature of
conversion."

Mrs. Ranby, I found, seems to consider Christianity as a kind of
free-masonry, and therefore thinks it superfluous to speak on serious
subjects to any but the initiated. If they do not _return the sign_, she
gives them up as blind and dead. She thinks she can only make herself
intelligible to those to whom certain peculiar phrases are familiar; and
though her friends may be correct, devout, and both doctrinally and
practically pious; yet if they can not catch a certain mystic meaning,
if there is not a sympathy of intelligence between her and them, if they
do not fully conceive of impressions, and can not respond to mysterious
communications, she holds them unworthy of intercourse with her. She
does not so much insist on high moral excellence as the criterion of
their worth, as on their own account of their internal feelings.

She holds very cheap, that gradual growth in piety which is, in reality,
no less the effect of divine grace, than those instantaneous
conversions, which she believes to be so common. She can not be
persuaded that, of every advance in piety, of every improvement in
virtue, of every illumination of the understanding, of every amendment
in the heart, of every rectification of the will, the Spirit of God is
no less the author, because it is progressive, than if