Visionary! Were not the good St. Pierre, and Fenelon, and
Howard, and Clarkson visionaries also?
What was John Woolman, to the wise and prudent of his day, but an amiable
enthusiast? What, to those of our own, is such an angel of mercy as
Dorothea Dix? Who will not, in view of the labors of such
philanthropists, adopt the language of Jonathan Edwards: "If these things
be enthusiasms and the fruits of a distempered brain, let my brain be
evermore possessed with this happy distemper"?
It must, however, be confessed that there is a cant of philanthropy too
general and abstract for any practical purpose,--a morbid
sentimentalism,--which contents itself with whining over real or
imaginary present evil, and predicting a better state somewhere in the
future, but really doing nothing to remove the one or hasten the coming
of the other. To its view the present condition of things is all wrong;
no green hillock or twig rises over the waste deluge; the heaven above is
utterly dark and starless: yet, somehow, out of this darkness which may
be felt, the light is to burst forth miraculously; wrong, sin, pain, and
sorrow are to be banished from the renovated world, and earth become a
vast epicurean garden or Mahometan heaven.
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