9.  And this habitual reference of the government of earth to its Supreme Ruler, is not more necessary to the hope, that sustains endurance, than to the patience which bides the time, in opposition to the indecent, passionate haste, which defeats its own end.  “He that believeth shall not make haste.”  There is much fruitless haste to bring the world to rights, for want of a lively belief in a sovereign controlling Power; whose wisdom, whose goodness, whose resources, whose interest, to bring the world to order and happiness, infinitely transcend ours.  Thus is missed the conclusion, if He can endure to see the stream of evil flow on age after age; then discretion would set some bounds to our zeal, to see all evil rectified.  And the clearer this conclusion is the result of faith, the surer the bounds will be just such, as to save from losing all by a headlong precipitancy.

In short, that habit of mind equally ready to accept the right and the true, whether it come with a suspicious air of novelty and singularity, or whether as old and vulgar it be scouted for being behind the age—­ that habit which neither yields to discouragements, nor favors the fool-hardy haste, which calculates neither time nor its own strength; which discriminates, when to “contend earnestly,” and when to “let them alone,” the dogged adherents to falsehood and wrong, to the teachings of time and circumstances, their conscience and their God, till every plant which he hath not planted be rooted up by these mightier energies—­the habit, realizing all the good of the radical, in proving all things, and all the glory of the conservative, in holding fast what is good;—­this habit, so favorable to human progress, but involving so rare a combination of seemingly opposite qualities, as scarcely to be accounted for on all apparent influences, has been well described, as a “life hid with Christ in God.”  And truly has it been remarked, in view of the general result of ordinary tendencies and influences in forming one-sided characters, that becoming as a little child, expresses no less fittingly the conditions of entering the kingdom of nature, and thinking with the wise, than of entering the kingdom of heaven, and worshipping with the holy.

Of the spiritual more grievously than of the intellectual life is it true, that, “whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it.”  Here emphatically does the individual labor hardly, to digest into his life the conclusions of reason and conscience, in advance of the average understanding of the age.  Professor Lyell, speaking of the Millerite phrenzy, and how some men of pretty sound mind were carried away with it, remarks to this effect:  “Religious delusion is like a famine fever, which attacks first the hungry and emaciated, but in its progress cuts down many of the well-fed and robust.”