hould fall to be felt most--and I
truly wish _you_ may never feel what I have to bear in looking on,
quite powerless, and silent, while you are subjected to this
treatment, which I refuse to characterize--so blind is it _for_
blindness. I think I ought to understand what a father may exact, and
a child should comply with; and I respect the most ambiguous of love's
caprices if they give never so slight a clue to their all-justifying
source. Did I, when you signified to me the probable objections--you
remember what--to myself, my own happiness,--did I once allude to,
much less argue against, or refuse to acknowledge those objections?
For I wholly sympathize, however it go against me, with the highest,
wariest, pride and love for you, and the proper jealousy and vigilance
they entail--but now, and here, the jewel is not being over guarded,
but ruined, cast away. And whoever is privileged to interfere should
do so in the possessor's own interest--all common sense
interferes--all rationality against absolute no-reason at all. And you
ask whether you ought to obey this no-reason? I will tell you: all
passive obedience and implicit submission of will and intellect is by
far too easy, if well considered, to be the course prescribed by God
to Man in this life of probation--for they _evade_ probation
altogether, though foolish people think otherwise. Chop off your legs,
you will never go astray; stifle your reason altogether and you will
find it is difficult to reason ill. 'It is hard to make these
sacrifices!'--not so hard as to lose the reward or incur the penalty
of an Eternity to come; 'hard to effect them, then, and go through
with them'--_not_ hard, when the leg is to be _cut off_--that it is
rather harder to keep it quiet on a stool, I know very well. The
partial indulgence, the proper exercise of one's faculties, there is
the difficulty and problem for solution, set by that Providence which
might have made the laws of Religion as indubitable as those of
vitality, and revealed the articles of belief as certainly as that
condition, for instance, by which we breathe so many times in a minute
to support life. But there is no reward proposed for the feat of
breathing, and a great one for that of believing--consequently there
must go a great deal more of voluntary effort to this latter than is
implied in the getting absolutely rid of it at once, by adopting the
direction of an infallible church, or private judgment of another--f