Page:The crater; or, Vulcan's peak.djvu/454

 214 THE CRATER; trained to the more subdued deportment of reason and propriety. The shouting and declamatory parts of religion may be the evil spirits growling and yelling before they are expelled, but these must not be mistaken for the voice of. the Ancient of Days. The morals decayed as religion obtained its false direc~ tions. Self-righteousness, the inseparable companion of the quarrels of sects, took the place of humility, and thus became prevalent that most dangerous condition of the soul of man, when he imagines that he sanctifies what he does ; a frame of mind, by the way, that is by no means strange to very many who ought to be conscious of their unworthiness. With the morals of the colony, its prospe rity, even in worldly interests, began to lose ground. The merchants, as usual, had behaved badly in the political struggle. The intense selfishness of the caste kept them occupied with the pursuit of gain, at the most critical mo ments of the struggle, or when their influence might have been of use ; and when the mischief was done, and they began to feel its consequences, or, what to them was the same thing, to fancy that the low price of oil in Europe was owing to the change of constitution at the Crater, they started up in convulsed and mercenary efforts to coun teract the evil, referring all to money, and not manifesting any particular notions of principles concerning the man ner in which it was used. As the cooler heads of the minority perhaps we ought to say of the majority, for, oddly enough, the minority now actually ruled in Crater- dom, by carrying out fully the principle of the sway of the majority but, as the cooler heads of the colony well un derstood that nothing material was to follow from such spasmodic and ill-directed efforts, the merchants were not backed in their rising, and, as commonly happens with the slave, the shaking of their chains only bound them so much the tighter. At length the Rancocus returned from the voyage on which she had sailed just previously to the change in the constitution, and her owner announced his intention to go in her to America, the next trip, himself. His brothers, Heaton, Anne, their children, and, finally, Captain Betts, Friend Martha, and their issue, all, sooner or later, joined