"My dear Sir John," said Mr. Stanley, "it is among the daily but comparatively petty trials of every man who is deeply in earnest to secure his immortal interests, to be classed with low and wild enthusiasts whom his judgment condemns, with hypocrites against whom his principles revolt, and with men, pious and conscientious I am most willing to allow, but differing widely from his own views; with others who evince a want of charity in some points, and a want of judgment in most. To be identified, I say, with men so different from yourself, because you hold in common some great truths, which all real Christians have held in all ages, and because you agree with them in avoiding the blamable excesses of dissipation, is among the sacrifices of reputation, which a man must be contented to make who is earnest in the great object of a Christian's pursuit. I trust, however, that, through divine grace, I shall never renounce my integrity for the praise of men, who have so little consistency, that though they pretend their quarrel is with your faith, yet who would not care how extravagant your belief was if your practice assimilated with their own. I trust, on the other hand, that I shall always maintain my candor toward those with whom we are unfairly involved; men, religious, though somewhat eccentric, devout, though injudicious, and sincere, though mistaken; but who, with all their errors, against which I protest, and with all their indiscretion, which I lament, and with all their ill-judged, because irregular zeal, I shall ever think--always excepting hypocrites and false pretenders--are better men, and in a safer state than their revilers." "I have often suspected," said I, "that under the plausible pretense of objecting to your creed, men conceal their quarrel with the commandments." "My dear Stanley," said Sir John, "but for this visit, I might have continued in the common error, that there was but one description of religious professors; that a fanatical spirit, and a fierce adoption of one or two particular doctrines, to the exclusion of all the rest, with a total indifference to morality, and a sovereign contempt of prudence, made up the character against which, I confess, I entertained a secret disgust. Still, however, I loved _you_ too well, and had too high an opinion of your understanding, to suspect that you would ever be drawn into those practical errors, to which I had been told your theory inevitably led. Yet I own I had an aversion to this dreaded enthusiasm which drove me into the opposite extreme." "How many men have I known," replied Mr. Stanley, smiling, "who, from their dread of a burning zeal, have taken refuge in a freezing indifference! As to the two extremes of heat and cold, neither of them is the true climate of Christianity; yet the fear of each drives men of opposite complexions into the other, instead of fixing them in the temperate zone which lies between them, and which is the region of genuine piety."