I am naturally a very mild-tempered man, and am not and never was very sensitive to wounds inflicted by the tongue; and Mr. Cotton might have abused me or said all manner of hard things against me till he was exhausted, and I could have remained unmoved; but when he alluded to my relation with another, especially since I could not defend it, and called the beautiful, the lovely, the philanthropic Priscilla a Moabitish woman, and attacked her honor, my blood was up, and I instantly resolved that he should suffer for it. I however kept this to myself, assured him that he was uncharitable, and judged an estimable lady rashly; that my relations with Priscilla were not precisely a matter for his cognizance, as we were neither of us under his parochial charge. I respected him as an old friend of my father’s, and as a descendant of one of the greatest men of the early Massachusetts Colony. I had no doubt of his good intentions, and affectionate interest in me and my family; but I was of age, and competent to take care of myself. What I was doing I was doing with my eyes open, calmly, deliberately, and from what I held to be justifiable motives. I was prepared to take the responsibility. Warnings, expostulations, would avail nothing. I was resolved to push my scientific investigations to the furthest limits possible. I would, if I should be able, wrest from nature her last secret, and avail myself of all her mysterious forces. I did not pretend to say whether there were devils and evil spirits or not, although I believed God made all things good, very good; but if there were, I had nothing to do with them, for I invoked mysterious agencies only for a good end, in the cause of philanthropy and human progress. If they were spirits I was dealing with, they must be white spirits rather than black; and if I studied and even practised magic, I was sure it was not black magic, but white. “All that is very well said,” replied Mr. Cotton, “and yet you know that you are carried away by indiscreet curiosity, by an unholy ambition, and perhaps by lawless lust, and you dare not, alone in your closet, ask the blessing of God on your proceedings. Bear with me. I am an old man, and let my gray hairs plead with you, if not my sacred profession. I know that the young men of our time lose their reverence for religion, and turn up their noses in profound disgust when we speak to them of duty and the solemn responsibilities of life. I know they are impatient of restraint, and burning with a passion for liberty, as they call it. I know they deem it wisdom to depart from the old ways, to forsake the God of their fathers, and to hew out to themselves cisterns, alas, broken cisterns, which will hold no water. But let me tell you, my friend, that they are only sowing the seeds of future sorrow, and will reap only a too abundant harvest. No man in his old age ever regretted that he feared God and practised virtue in his youth.”