to acknowledge those objections?  For I wholly sympathize, however it go against me, with the highest, wariest, pride and love for you, and the proper jealousy and vigilance they entail—­but now, and here, the jewel is not being over guarded, but ruined, cast away.  And whoever is privileged to interfere should do so in the possessor’s own interest—­all common sense interferes—­all rationality against absolute no-reason at all.  And you ask whether you ought to obey this no-reason?  I will tell you:  all passive obedience and implicit submission of will and intellect is by far too easy, if well considered, to be the course prescribed by God to Man in this life of probation—­for they evade probation altogether, though foolish people think otherwise.  Chop off your legs, you will never go astray; stifle your reason altogether and you will find it is difficult to reason ill.  ’It is hard to make these sacrifices!’—­not so hard as to lose the reward or incur the penalty of an Eternity to come; ’hard to effect them, then, and go through with them’—­not hard, when the leg is to be cut off—­that it is rather harder to keep it quiet on a stool, I know very well.  The partial indulgence, the proper exercise of one’s faculties, there is the difficulty and problem for solution, set by that Providence which might have made the laws of Religion as indubitable as those of vitality, and revealed the articles of belief as certainly as that condition, for instance, by which we breathe so many times in a minute to support life.  But there is no reward proposed for the feat of breathing, and a great one for that of believing—­consequently there must go a great deal more of voluntary effort to this latter than is implied in the getting absolutely rid of it at once, by adopting the direction of an infallible church, or private judgment of another—­for all our life is some form of religion, and all our action some belief, and there is but one law, however modified, for the greater and the less.  In your case I do think you are called upon to do your duty to yourself; that is, to God in the end.  Your own reason should examine the whole matter in dispute by every light which can be put in requisition; and every interest that appears to be affected by your conduct should have its utmost claims considered—­your father’s in the first place; and that interest, not in the miserable limits of a few days’ pique or whim in which it would seem to express itself; but in its whole extent ... the hereafter which all momentary passion prevents him seeing ... indeed, the present on either side which everyone else must see.  And this examination made, with whatever earnestness you will, I do think and am sure that on its conclusion you should act, in confidence that a duty has been performed ... difficult, or how were it a duty?  Will it not be infinitely harder to act so than to blindly adopt his pleasure, and die under it?  Who can not do that?