Equally holding to certain fundamental points, they were both anxious to regenerate mankind, but were widely opposed in respect to the means to be employed for that purpose. The captain looked primarily to schools, lectures, locomotion, and the wide diffusion of commerce and intelligence, and thought if man fell by eating of the tree of knowledge, he figuratively was destined to rise by a repetition of the act. Miss Belfield principally relied on the multiplication of churches and Sunday-schools, the extension of missionary labours, the early conversion of the Jews, and the like. He thought that religion was the first subject to which an instructed mind would direct its attention. Miss Belfield, on the contrary, considered it the very last on which, if not forced upon him, he would seek to be informed. She considered man as radically vicious, that suffering was necessary to try him, and that it was perhaps better to preach resignation to evils, than to waste time in vain attempts to diminish them materially. Her brother differed, too, in this, and thought that happiness was quite as well calculated to fit us for heaven as misery; and that it was almost a libel on the Deity to suppose that the thanks and praises of a rejoicing heart would not be as acceptable as those emanating from one bowed down by sorrow and suffering. He thought that the evils inseparably annexed to our condition, such as death, sickness, and the loss of those tenderly beloved, were trials sufficient, without our unnecessarily increasing the load by fictitious ones—clearly the result of our follies, contentions, and prejudices. He used to compare society, as at present constituted, to a body of undisciplined troops, composed of jarring detachments, under incompetent leaders, and amongst whom the finest military qualities and powers are neutralized or impaired by want of concert and organization. “Educate your masses,” he would say, “for without you do that no conceivable form of government will produce happiness to the governed. Construct the finest piece of mechanism you may, on the strictest principles of art, if the material is rotten and unsound, it must give at some point—the due antagonism of its springs will be destroyed, and it will not work.” This diversity of views, which I have endeavoured to describe, used to give rise, as I have already stated, to numerous animated discussions. I used to listen to these collisions of intellect, during the evenings we passed together, with much interest; and when I could see my way through the _pros_ and _cons_, was wont sometimes to venture an opinion, to which the captain and his sister always listened with eagerness, as if anxious to know how the matter would strike on my young and unsophisticated mind. Some of these discussions, that is, the substance of them, I still remember, and had I space, and were this the place for them, I might here be tempted to record.