t the man wasn't far wrong. I began to see as all this weighing
and sifting what this text means and that text means, and whether folks
are saved all by God's grace, or whether there goes an ounce o' their
own will to't, was no part o' real religion at all. You may talk o'
these things for hours on end, and you'll only be all the more coxy and
conceited for't. So I took to going nowhere but to church, and hearing
nobody but Mr. Irwine, for he said nothing but what was good and what
you'd be the wiser for remembering. And I found it better for my soul
to be humble before the mysteries o' God's dealings, and not be making
a clatter about what I could never understand. And they're poor foolish
questions after all; for what have we got either inside or outside of us
but what comes from God? If we've got a resolution to do right, He gave
it us, I reckon, first or last; but I see plain enough we shall never do
it without a resolution, and that's enough for me."

Adam, you perceive, was a warm admirer, perhaps a partial judge, of Mr.
Irwine, as, happily, some of us still are of the people we have known
familiarly. Doubtless it will be despised as a weakness by that lofty
order of minds who pant after the ideal, and are oppressed by a general
sense that their emotions are of too exquisite a character to find fit
objects among their everyday fellowmen. I have often been favoured with
the confidence of these select natures, and find them to concur in
the experience that great men are overestimated and small men are
insupportable; that if you would love a woman without ever looking back
on your love as a folly, she must die while you are courting her; and if
you would maintain the slightest belief in human heroism, you must never
make a pilgrimage to see the hero. I confess I have often meanly shrunk
from confessing to these accomplished and acute gentlemen what my own
experience has been. I am afraid I have often smiled with hypocritical
assent, and gratified them with an epigram on the fleeting nature of our
illusions, which any one moderately acquainted with French literature
can command at a moment's notice. Human converse, I think some wise
man has remarked, is not rigidly sincere. But I herewith discharge my
conscience, and declare that I have had quite enthusiastic movements of
admiration towards old gentlemen who spoke the worst English, who were
occasionally fretful in their temper, and who had never moved in a
higher sphe