Notwithstanding their spiritual experiences, it was, for instance, no easier to get them to pay their debts than heretofore. Of course there were, and had always been, thoroughly honest men and women amongst them; but there were others who took prominent part in their observances, who seemed to have no remotest suspicion that religion had anything to do with money or money’s worth--not to know that God cared whether a child of his met his obligations or not. Such fulfilled the injunction to owe nothing by acknowledging nothing. One man, when pressed, gave as a reason for his refusal, that Christ had paid all his debts. Possibly this contemptible state of feeling had been fostered by an old superstition that it was unlucky to pay up everything, whence they had always been in the habit of leaving at least a few shillings of their shop-bills to be carried forward to the settlement after the next fishing season. But when a widow whose husband had left property, would acknowledge no obligation to discharge his debts, it came to be rather more than a whim. Evidently the religion of many of them was as yet of a poor sort--precisely like that of the negroes, whose devotion so far outstrips their morality. If there had but been some one of themselves to teach that the true outlet and sedative of overstrained feeling is right action! that the performance of an unpleasant duty, say the paying of their debts, was a far more effectual as well as more specially religious mode of working off their excitement than dancing! that _feeling_ is but the servant of _character_ until it becomes its child! or rather, that _feeling_ is but a mere vapour until condensed into character! that the _only_ process through which it can be thus consolidated is well-doing--the putting forth of the right thing according to the conscience universal and individual, and that thus, and thus only, can the veil be withdrawn from between the man and his God, and the man be saved in beholding the face of his Father! “But have patience--give them time,” said Mr Graham, who had watched the whole thing from the beginning. “If their religion is religion, it will work till it purifies; if it is not, it will show itself for what it is, by plunging them into open vice. The mere excitement and its extravagance--the mode in which their gladness breaks out--means nothing either way. _The man_ is the willing, performing being, not the feeling shouting singing being: in the latter there may be no individuality--nothing more than receptivity of the movement of the mass. But when a man gets up and goes out and discharges an obligation, he is an individual; to him God has spoken, and he has opened his ears to hear: God and that man are henceforth in communion.”