now.

*****

For courage respects courage; but where a faith has been trodden out, we
may look for a mean and narrow population.

*****

Its not only a great flight of confidence for a man to change his creed
and go out of his family for heaven's sake; but the odds are--nay, and
the hope is--that, with all this great transition in the eyes of man,
he has not changed himself a hairbreadth to the eyes of God. Honour to
those who do so, for the wrench is sore. But it argues something narrow,
whether of strength or weakness, whether of the prophet or the fool, in
those who can take a sufficient interest in such infinitesimal and human
operations, or who can quit a friendship for a doubtful operation of the
mind. And I think I should not leave my old creed for another, changing
only words for words; but by some brave reading, embrace it in spirit
and truth, and find wrong as wrong for me as for the best of other
communions.

*****

It is not a basketful of law-papers, nor the hoofs and pistol-butts of a
regiment of horse, that can change one tittle of a ploughman's thoughts.
Outdoor rustic people have not many ideas, but such as they have are
hardy plants, and thrive flourishingly in persecution. One who has grown
a long while in the sweat of laborious noons, and under the stars at
night, a frequenter of hills and forests, an old honest countryman, has,
in the end, a sense of communion with the powers of the universe, and
amicable relations towards his God. Like my mountain Plymouth Brother,
he knows the Lord. His religion does not repose upon a choice of logic;
it is the poetry of the man's existence, the philosophy of the history
of his life. God, like a great power, like a great shining sun, has
appeared to this simple fellow in the course of years, and become the
ground and essence of his least reflections; and you may change creeds
and dogmas by authority, or proclaim, a new religion with the sound of
trumpets, if you will; but here is a man who has his own thoughts, and
will stubbornly adhere to them in good and evil. He is a Catholic, a
Protestant, or a Plymouth Brother, in the same indefeasible sense that a
man is not a woman, or a woman is not a man. For he could not vary from
his faith, unless he could eradicate all memory of the past, and, in a
strict and not conventional meaning, change his mind.

*****

For still the Lord is Lord of might;
In deeds, in deeds, he takes delight;
The plou