rm," Everett said, smiling; "for I
have joined no sect, attached myself to no recognized body of
believers."

"You belong to nothing, then? You believe in nothing, I suppose?" she
said, with the instinctive logic of her class. "Oh, Everett!" real
distress for the moment overpowering her indignation, "it is those
visionary notions of yours that have brought you to this. It was to be
expected. You poets and dreamers go on refining your ideas, forsooth,
till even the religion of the ordinary world isn't good enough for you."

Everett waited patiently till this first gust had passed by. Then, with
that steady, calm lucidity which, strange to say, was characteristic of
this Visionary's mind and intellect, he explained, so far as he could,
his views and his reasons. It could not be expected that his listener
should comprehend or enter into what he said. At first, indeed, she
appeared to derive some small consolation from the fact that at least
Everett had not "turned Dissenter." She hated Methodists, she
declared,--intending thus to include with sweeping liberality all
denominations in the ban of her disapproval. She would have deemed it an
unpardonable crime, had the young man deserted the Church of his fathers
in order to join the Congregation, some ranting conventicle. But if her
respectability was shocked at the idea of his becoming a Methodist, her
better feelings were outraged when she found, as she said, that he
"belonged to nothing." She viewed with dislike and distrust all forms of
religion that differed from her own; but she could not believe in the
possibility of a religion that had no external form at all. She was
dismayed and perplexed, poor lady! and even paused midway in her
wrathful remonstrance to the misguided young man, to lament anew over
his fatal errors. She could not understand, she said, truly enough,
what in the world he meant. His notions were perfectly extraordinary and
incomprehensible. She was deeply, deeply shocked, and grieved for him,
and for every one connected with him.

In fact, the very earnestness and sincerity in their own opinions of a
certain calibre of minds make them incapable of understanding such a
state of things. That a man should believe differently from all they
have been taught to believe appears to them as simply preposterous as
that he should breathe differently. And so it is that only the highest
order of belief can afford to be tolerant; and, as extremes meet, it
require