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Untitled Article
thinking pool , and gives it the power of healing . In morality and philanthropy , original thought is often the result of strong feeling . Necessit y is the mother of that Invention which has Selfish for its praenomen . There is an Invention which affiliates itself on
Sympathy . When the evils which press upon the feebler portions of humanity can make themselves understood and felt by the stronger , the discovery of the remedy , and its application , is drawin g nigh . This is better than the sentimentality of a sighing heart . It is turning emotion to good account . Tears , like other water , should not run to waste . The moralist should be like the
practical engineer , who if he finds a full flowing stream , gives a blessing on its beauty , and then puts up a corn or a cotton-mill . We have found , very unexpectedly , in this family gallery of stiff and starched portraits , one which is most lovely and affecting . The unpromising name of Mehetabel Wesley is the title to a deep romance of real life , of which the pathos is most genuine ; and the few pages which contain it are full of moral instruction . She
was a victim , and no common one , to those false systems of duty which have sacrificed so many hecatombs . Her life was alongdrawn tissue of suffering ; religion and virtue ( so called ) stretching out the web till the quivering threads could hold no longer . How many more of earth ' s finest beings must yet be agonized and immolated , before the world will learn that religion is a law of love , and virtue the means of happiness !
From various indications in the brief narrative before us , it is evident that Mehetabel Wesley , Hetty , as her brothers called her , was a beautifully-organized creature , and endowed with that peculiarity of the nervous system which is the physical temperament of poetry ; which quickens alike the organs of sense and the apparatus of thought ; which makes perception clear , imagination
vivid , and emotion intense ; and to which earth is either heaven or hell , as external circumstance harmonizes or jars with the internal constitution . Such are the beings whom our clumsy frame-work of society , and our heavy millstones of theology , seem put up purposely to mangle ; and who , formed as they are to love and be
loved , to bless and be blessed , are continually crushed between this world and the world to come . For rarely indeed are they rightly posited . The chances must go hard against them till the world grows wiser . Their story should be conned and commented upon , that the world may grow wiser . Most frequently is Woman the victim . The curse has been on her from the sacrifice of the
daughter of Jephtha , the Gileadite , down to that of the sister of Wesley , the Methodist ; and her day of deliverance is not yet . But we are forgetting that our readers have not gone through the story with us , and may reasonably wonder what we are moralizing upon . Poor Hetty's primeval calamity was that of being born into what is called a well-regulated family . Her father , the Rev .
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A Victim . 165
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), March 2, 1833, page 165, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2610/page/21/
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