their deaths they are "not divided"
from the love of others. Their peculiar sensibility gives a depth to
their religion: it is at once deeper and more human than that of other
men. As their sympathetic knowledge of those whom they have seen is
great, so it is with their knowledge of Him whom they have not seen;
and as is their knowledge, so is their love, it is deep, from their
nature; rich and intimate, from the variety of their experience;
chastened by the ever-present sense of their weakness and of its
consequences.

In extreme opposition to this is the ascetic species of goodness. This
is not, as is sometimes believed, a self-produced ideal,--a simply
voluntary result of discipline and restraint. Some men have by nature
what others have to elaborate by effort. Some men have a repulsion
from the world. All of us have, in some degree, a protective instinct;
an impulse, that is to say, to start back from what may trouble us, to
shun what may fascinate us, to avoid what may tempt us. On the moral
side of human nature this preventive check is occasionally imperious:
it holds the whole man under its control,--makes him recoil from the
world, be offended at its amusements, be repelled by its occupations,
be scared by its sins. The consequences of this tendency, when it is
thus in excess, upon the character are very great and very singular.
It secludes a man in a sort of natural monastery; he lives in a kind of
moral solitude: and the effects of his isolation, for good and for
evil, on his disposition are very many. The best result is a singular
capacity for meditative religion. Being aloof from what is earthly,
such persons are shut up with what is spiritual; being unstirred by the
incidents of time, they are alone with the eternal; rejecting this
life, they are alone with what is beyond. According to the measure of
their minds, men of this removed and secluded excellence become eminent
for a settled and brooding piety, for a strong and predominant
religion. In human life, too, in a thousand ways, their isolated
excellence is apparent. They walk through the whole of it with an
abstinence from sense, a zeal of morality, a purity of ideal, which
other men have not; their religion has an imaginative grandeur, and
their life something of an unusual impeccability: and these are
obviously singular excellences. But the deficiencies to which the same
character tends are equally singular. In the first place, their