It is one thing to see things as they are; to be consumed with indignation at the wrong; to shiver with aversion to the abominable; and quite another to rouse the will to confront the devil, and resist him until he flee.

For this the whole education of Hesper had tended to unfit her.

What she had been taught--and that in a world rendered possible only by the self-denial of a God--was to drift with the stream, denying herself only that divine strength of honest love, which would soonest help her to breast it.
For the earth, it is a blessed thing that those who arrogate to themselves the holy name of society, and to whom so large a portion of the foolish world willingly yields it, are in reality so few and so ephemeral.

Mere human froth are they, worked up by the churning of the world-sea--rainbow-tinted froth, lovely thinned water, weaker than the unstable itself out of which it is blown.

Great as their ordinance seems, it is evanescent as arbitrary: the arbitrary is but the slavish puffed up--and is gone with the hour.