Men of this austere and somewhat crabbed rectitude may be found in every department of life, but they are most prominent and most efficient when they engage in the reform of abuses, whether those abuses be in manners, institutions, or religion; and here they never shrink from the rough, rude work of the cause they espouse. They are commonly adored by their followers, commonly execrated by their opponents; but they receive the execration as the most convincing proof that they have performed their duties, as the shrieks of the wounded testify to the certainty of the shots. Indeed, they take a kind of grim delight in so pointing their invective that the adversaries of their principles are turned into enemies of their persons, and scout at all fame which does not spring from obloquy. As they thus exist in a state of war, the gentler elements of their being fall into the background; the bitterness of the strife works into their souls, and gives to their conscientious wrath a certain Puritan pitilessness of temper and tone. In the thick of the fight, their battle-cry is, "No quarter to the enemies of God and man!"--and as, unfortunately, there are few men who, tried by their standards, are friends of man, population very palpably thins as the lava-tide of their invective sweeps over it, and to the mental eye men, disappear as man emerges. The gulf which yawns between uncompromising moral obligation and compromising human conduct is so immense that these fierce servants of the Lord seem to be fanatics and visionaries. But history demonstrates that they are among the most practical of all the forces which work in human affairs; for, without taking into account the response which their inflexible morality finds in the breasts of inflexibly moral men, their morality, in its application to common life, often becomes materialized, and shows an intimate connection with the most ordinary human appetites and passions. They commune with the mass of men through the subtile freemasonry of discontent. Compelled to hurl the thunderbolts of the moral law against injustice in possession, they unwittingly set fire to injustice smouldering in unrealized passions; and their speech is translated and transformed, in its passage into the public mind, into some such shape as this:--"These few persons who are dominant in Church and State, and who, while you physically and spiritually starve, are fed fat by the products of your labor and the illusions of your superstition, are powerful and prosperous, not from any virtue in themselves, but from the violation of those laws which God has ordained for the beneficent government of the universe. Their property and their power are the signs, not of their merits, but of their sins." The instinctive love of property and power are thus addressed to overturn the present possessors of property and power; and the vices of men are unconsciously enlisted in the service of the regeneration of man. The