Chapter 22 - Page 2

worship. Although this apparent sympathy of nature may be less true than
imaginative, its lesson is not destroyed, since it sufficiently shows that
what man chooses to consider good in this world is good, and that most of
its strife and deformities proceed from his own perversity.

The tenants of the valley of the Wish-Ton-Wish were little wont to disturb
the quiet of the Sabbath. Their error lay in the other extreme, since they
impaired the charities of life by endeavoring to raise man altogether
above the weakness of his nature. They substituted the revolting aspect of
a sublimated austerity, for that gracious though regulated exterior, by
which all in the body may best illustrate their hopes or exhibit their
gratitude. The peculiar air of those of whom we write was generated by the
error of the times and of the country, though something of its singularly
rigid character might have been derived from the precepts and example of
the individual who had the direction of the spiritual interests of the
parish. As this person will have further connexion with the matter of the
legend, he shall be more familiarly introduced in its pages.

The Reverend Meek Wolfe was, in spirit, a rare combination of the humblest
self-abasement and of fierce spiritual denunciation. Like so many others
of his sacred calling in the Colony he inhabited, he was not only the
descendant of a line of priests, but it was his greatest earthly hope that
he should also become the progenitor of a race in whom the ministry was to
be perpetuated as severely as if the regulated formula of the Mosaic
dispensation were still in existence. He had been educated in the infant
college of Harvard, an institution that the emigrants from England had the
wisdom and enterprise to found, within the first five-and-twenty years of
their colonial residence. Here this scion of so pious and orthodox a stock
had abundantly qualified himself for the intellectual warfare of his
future life, by regarding one set of opinions so steadily, as to leave
little reason to apprehend he would ever abandon the most trifling of the
outworks of his faith. No citadel ever presented a more hopeless curtain
to the besieger, than did the mind of this zealot to the efforts of
conviction; for on the side of his opponents, he contrived that every
avenue should be closed by a wall blank as indomitable obstinacy could
oppose. He appeared to think that all the minor conditions of argument and
reason had been disposed of by his ancestors, and that it only remain ed
for him to strengthen the many defences of his subject, and, now and then,
to scatter by a fierce sortie the doctrinal skirmishers who might
occasionally approach his parish. There was a remarkable singleness of
mind in this