It has been observed that persons who are themselves very pure are sometimes on that account blunt in their moral feelings. "Right, too rigid, hardens into wrong"--even into cruelty sometimes. A friend of one of these malicious philanthropists dined with him one day, and afterward related an anecdote illustrative of his character. While at the table, the children of the refining humanitarian, playing about the open door, were noisy and intractable, which caused him to speak to them impatiently. The disturbance, however, did not cease, and hearing one of the children cry out, he jumped spasmodically from the table, and demanded to know what was the matter. Upon being informed that one of them had accidentally pinched the finger of another, he immediately seized the hand of the innocent offender, and placing the forefinger at the hinge of the door, deliberately closed it--crushing the poor child's finger as a punishment. There is another equally authentic story of a reformer who hired his children to go to bed without their supper as a means of preserving their health, and then stole their money back again to pay them for the next abstinence. "I have never known a trader in philanthropy," says Coleridge, "who was not wrong in head or heart somewhere or other. Individuals so distinguished are usually unhappy in their family relations: men not benevolent or beneficent to individuals, but almost hostile to them; yet lavishing money and labor and time on the race, the abstract notion." "This is always true of those men," says Hawthorne, in his analysis of Hollingsworth, "who have surrendered themselves to an overruling power. It does not so much impel them from without, nor even operate as a motive power from within, but grows incorporate in all they think and feel, and finally converts them into little else save that one principle. 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 straight 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."