But had the system at which he was so enraged combined almost any
amount of human wisdom, spiritual insight, and imaginative beauty, I
question whether Hollingsworth's mind was in a fit condition to
receive it. I began to discern that he had come among us actuated by
no real sympathy with our feelings and our hopes, but chiefly because
we were estranging ourselves from the world, with which his lonely
and exclusive object in life had already put him at odds.
Hollingsworth must have been originally endowed with a great spirit
of benevolence, deep enough and warm enough to be the source of as
much disinterested good as Providence often allows a human being the
privilege of conferring upon his fellows. This native instinct yet
lived within him. I myself had profited by it, in my necessity. It
was seen, too, in his treatment of Priscilla. Such casual
circumstances as were here involved would quicken his divine power of
sympathy, and make him seem, while their influence lasted, the
tenderest man and the truest friend on earth. But by and by you
missed the tenderness of yesterday, and grew drearily conscious that
Hollingsworth had a closer friend than ever you could be; and this
friend was the cold, spectral monster which he had himself conjured
up, and on which he was wasting all the warmth of his heart, and of
which, at last,--as these men of a mighty purpose so invariably do,--
he had grown to be the bond-slave. It was his philanthropic theory.
This was a result exceedingly sad to contemplate, considering that it
had been mainly brought about by the very ardor and exuberance of his
philanthropy.
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