There is an order of writers who, with characters perverted or hardened through long practice of iniquity, yet possess an inherent divine sense of the good and the beautiful, and a passion for setting it forth, so that men’s hearts glow with the tenderness and the elevation which live not in the heart of the writer,—only in his head.
And there is another class of writers who are excellent in the social relations of life, and kindly and true in heart, yet who, intellectually, have a perverted pleasure in the ridiculous and distorted, the cunning, the crooked, the vicious,—who are never weary of holding up before us finished representations of folly and rascality.
Now, which is the worst of these? the former, who do mischief by making us mistrust the good? or the latter, who degrade us by making us familiar with evil?
“Thought and theory,” said Wordsworth, “must precede all action that moves to salutary purposes. Yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.”
Yes, and no. What we _act_ has its consequences on earth. What we _think_, its consequences in heaven. It is not without reason that action should be preferred before barren thought; but all action which in its result is worth any thing, must result from thought. So the old rhymester hath it:
“He that good thinketh good may do, And God will help him there unto; For was never good work wrought, Without beginning of good thought.”
The result of impulse is the positive; the result of consideration the negative. The positive is essentially and abstractedly better than the negative, though relatively to facts and circumstances it may not be the most expedient.
On my observing how often I had had reason to regret not having followed the first impulse, O. G. said, “In _good_ minds the first impulses are generally right and true, and, when altered or relinquished from regard to expediency arising out of complicated relations, I always feel sorry, for they remain right. Our first impulses always lean to the positive, our second thoughts to the negative; and I have no respect for the negative,—it is the vulgar side of every thing.”
On the other hand, it must be conceded, that one who stands endowed with great power and with great responsibilities in the midst of a thousand duties and interests, can no longer take things in this simple fashion; for the good first impulse, in its flow, meets, perhaps, some rock, and splits upon it; it recoils on the heart, and becomes abortive. Or the impulse to do good _here_ becomes injury _there_, and we are forced to calculate results; we cannot trust to them.