Chapter 30

"This is thy lesson, mighty sea!
Man calls the dimpled earth his own,
The flowery vale, the golden lea;
And on the wild gray mountain-stone
Claims nature's temple for his throne!
But where thy many voices sing
Their endless song, the deep, deep tone
Calls back his spirit's airy wing,
He shrinks into himself, when God is king!"

Lunt.

For some months after the change of government, Mark Woolston was
occupied in attending to the arrangement of his affairs, preparatory to
an absence of some length. Bridget had expressed a strong wish to visit
America once more, and her two eldest children were now of an age when
their education had got to be a matter of some solicitude. It was the
intention of their father to send them to Pennsylvania for that purpose,
when the proper time arrived, and to place them under the care of his
friends there, who would gladly take the charge. Recent events probably
quickened this intention, both as to feeling and time, for Mark was
naturally much mortified at the turn things had taken.

There was an obvious falling-off in the affairs of the colony from the
time it became transcendantly free. In religion, the sects ever had
fair-play, or ever since the arrival of the parsons, and that had been
running down, from the moment it began to run into excesses and
exaggerations. As soon as a man begins to _shout_ in religion, he may be
pretty sure that he is "hallooing before he is out of the woods." It is
true that all our feelings exhibit themselves, more or less, in
conformity to habits and manners, but there is something profane in the
idea that the spirit of God manifests it presence in yells and clamour,
even when in possession of those who have not been trained to the more
subdued deportment of reason and propriety. The shouting and declamatory
parts of religion may be the evil spirits growling and yelling before
they are expelled, but these must not be mistaken for the voice of the
Ancient of Days.

The morals decayed as religion obtained its false directions.
Self-righteousness, the inseparable companion of the quarrels of sects,
took the place of humility, and thus became prevalent that most
dangerous condition of the soul of man, when he imagines that _he_
sanctifies what he does; a frame of mind, by the way, that is by no
means strange to very many who ought to be conscious of their
unworthiness. With the morals of the colony, its prosperity, even in
worldly interests, began to lose ground. The merchants, as usual, had
behaved badly in the political struggle. The intense selfishness of the
caste kept them occupied with the pursuit of gain, at the most critical
moments of the struggle, or when their influence might have been