is not unfrequently found to possess benevolence as well as veneration in a high degree; and the zealots of all countries and religions are almost invariably creatures of strong and violent passions, to which the extravagance of their zeal and devotion furnishes an outlet, which is not always innocent in its direction or effects.  Thus, in their enthusiasm—­which is only a minor madness—­whether the Hindoo bramin or the Spanish bigot, the English roundhead or the follower of the “only true faith” at Mecca, be understood, it is but a word and a blow—­though the word be a hurried prayer to the God of their adoration, and the blow be aimed with all the malevolence of hell at the bosom of a fellow-creature.  There is no greater inconsistency in the one character than in the other.  The temperament which, under false tuition, makes the zealot, and drives him on to the perpetration of wholesale murder, while uttering a prayer to the Deity, prompts the same individual who, as an assassin or a highwayman, cuts your throat, and picks your pocket, and at the next moment bestows his ill-gotten gains without reservation upon the starving beggar by the wayside.

There was yet another reason which swayed Munro not a little in his determination, if possible, to save the youth—­and this was a lurking sentiment of hostility to Rivers.  His pride, of late, on many occasions, had taken alarm at the frequent encroachments of his comrade upon its boundaries.  The too much repeated display of that very mental superiority in his companion, which had so much fettered him, had aroused his own latent sense of independence; and the utterance of sundry pungent rebukes on the part of Rivers had done much towards provoking within him a new sentiment of dislike for that person, which gladly availed itself of the first legitimate occasion for exercise and development.  The very superiority which commanded, and which he honored, he hated for that very reason; and, in our analysis of moral dependence, we may add, that, in Greece, and the mere Hob of the humble farmhouse, Munro might have been the countryman to vote Aristides into banishment because of his reputation for justice.  The barrier is slight, the space short, the transition easy, from one to the other extreme of injustice; and the peasant who voted for the banishment of the just man, in another sphere and under other circumstances, would have been a Borgia or a Catiline.  With this feeling in his bosom, Munro was yet unapprized of its existence.  It is not with the man, so long hurried forward by his impulses as at last to become their creature, to analyze either their character or his own.  Vice, though itself a monster, is yet the slave of a thousand influences, not absolutely vicious in themselves; and their desires it not uncommonly performs when blindfolded.  It carries the knife, it strikes the blow, but is not always the chooser of its own victim.