And I think I should not leave my
old creed for another, changing only words for words; but
by some brave reading, embrace it in spirit and truth, and
find wrong as wrong for me as for the best of other
communions.
*
It is not a basketful of law-papers, nor the hoofs and
pistol-butts of a regiment of horse, that can change one
tittle of a ploughman's thoughts. Outdoor rustic people
have not many ideas, but such as they have are hardy
plants, and thrive flourishingly in persecution. One who
has grown a long while in the sweat of laborious noons, and
under the stars at night, a frequenter of hills and
forests, an old honest countryman, has, in the end, a sense
of communion with the powers of the universe, and amicable
relations towards his God. Like my mountain Plymouth
Brother, he knows the Lord. His religion does not repose
upon a choice of logic; it is the poetry of the man's
existence, the philosophy of the history of his life. God,
like a great power, like a great shining sun, has appeared
to this simple fellow in the course of years, and become
the ground and essence of his least reflections; and you
may change creeds and dogmas by authority, or proclaim, a
new religion with the sound of trumpets, if you will; but
here is a man who has his own thoughts, and will stubbornly
adhere to them in good and evil. He is a Catholic, a
Protestant, or a Plymouth Brother, in the same indefeasible
sense that a man is not a woman, or a woman is not a man.
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