When such begins to be the predicament,
it is not cowardice, but wisdom, to avoid these victims. They have
no heart, no sympathy, no reason, no conscience. They will keep no
friend, unless he make himself the mirror of their purpose; they will
smite and slay you, and trample your dead corpse under foot, all the
more readily, if you take the first step with them, and cannot take
the second, and the third, and every other step of their terribly
strait path. They have an idol to which they consecrate themselves
high-priest, and deem it holy work to offer sacrifices of whatever is
most precious; and never once seem to suspect--so cunning has the
Devil been with them--that this false deity, in whose iron features,
immitigable to all the rest of mankind, they see only benignity and
love, is but a spectrum of the very priest himself, projected upon
the surrounding darkness. And the higher and purer the original
object, and the more unselfishly it may have been taken up, the
slighter is the probability that they can be led to recognize the
process by which godlike benevolence has been debased into
all-devouring egotism.
Of course I am perfectly aware that the above statement is
exaggerated, in the attempt to make it adequate. Professed
philanthropists have gone far; but no originally good man, I presume,
ever went quite so far as this. Let the reader abate whatever he
deems fit. The paragraph may remain, however, both for its truth and
its exaggeration, as strongly expressive of the tendencies which were
really operative in Hollingsworth, and as exemplifying the kind of
error into which my mode of observation was calculated to lead me.
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