Good! Hear, hear! Hurrah! The eagerness both of attention and
intention, exhibited in all the countenances, made them a most
impressive sight. There was no carelessness, no languor, no idle
curiosity; none of the many shades of indifference to be seen in
all other assemblies, visible for one moment there. That every man
felt his condition to be, somehow or other, worse than it might be;
that every man considered it incumbent on him to join the rest,
towards the making of it better; that every man felt his only hope
to be in his allying himself to the comrades by whom he was
surrounded; and that in this belief, right or wrong (unhappily
wrong then), the whole of that crowd were gravely, deeply,
faithfully in earnest; must have been as plain to any one who chose
to see what was there, as the bare beams of the roof and the
whitened brick walls. Nor could any such spectator fail to know in
his own breast, that these men, through their very delusions,
showed great qualities, susceptible of being turned to the happiest
and best account; and that to pretend (on the strength of sweeping
axioms, howsoever cut and dried) that they went astray wholly
without cause, and of their own irrational wills, was to pretend
that there could be smoke without fire, death without birth,
harvest without seed, anything or everything produced from nothing.
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