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Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
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Untitled Article
I bear , I must feel them . And if you cannot forgive what I have said , I sincerely promise never to offend you by saying too much , which ( with begging your blessing ) is all from * Honoured Sir , 4 Your most obedient daughter , * Mehetabel Wright . *
There are other symptoms that the pure mind of Mehetabel had a glimpse of the truth as to this marriage . It struggled hard in those iron fetters of superstition which had been riveted on her by education . Had not her will been effectually broken down by the process which has been described , she must have seen the fallacy of its bein g a duty to make a profession of everlasting
love from which her nature recoiled . But , according to the teaching she had received , even from birth , resistance would have been a sin of double damnation , rebellion against her parents and her God . And the whole family were upon her , backed by their cohorts of religious and godly friends . They would all have the vow , the whole vow , and nothing but the vow . No , there was one exception ; not a brother ; not John , the founder of
Methodism , nor Charles , his apostle , nor Samuel , the pink of high church piety ; the priests and levites passed her by , or worse than that ; the true religion of the case only beamed upon a woman ' s heart , and revealed itself in a sister ' s sympathy . Of Mary Wesley , the sister of whom we spoke as having escaped by death in the first year of marriage from their common sisterhood of suffering , Mehetabel thus writes in an affectionate elegy : —
c When deep immers'd in griefs beyond redress , And friends and kindred hei&hten'd my distress ; And by relentless efforts made me prove Pain , grief , despair , and wedlock without love ; My soft Maria could alone dissent , O'erlook'd the fatal vow , and mourn'd the punishment . '—p . 236 .
The victim is bound to the altar . A brand never to be erased marks her for the property of a brute . The truthful burst of agony from the lips of disappointed love was false in its form of expression , and superstition has made it a spell whereby to conjure up more vows , which are false in essence , and defy volition , which pledge her for ever to love the unlovely , and honour the
dishonoured , and obey what there were immorality in not resisting . It is done ; and the long train of hopeless years commence their lagging march through a world whose beauty should only echo the voice of joy and singing ; a wretched procession , in tears and anguish , slow winding to the grave .
And this endured , or rather she endured , through the quarter of a century . It was only in the six and twentieth year of her suffering , that she was dismissed to tell Milton in heaven that his doctrine was still immoral upon earth . Some notion of her mode of existence may be formed from the following extract : •—
Untitled Article
174 A Victim .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), March 2, 1833, page 174, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2610/page/30/
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