Page:Thoreau - As remembered by a young friend.djvu/138

 disappointment in early love to purify life; fearless and in good heart in life and in death, — one may well ask, Is Folly behind all this?

Make allowance for strong statement due to any original, vigorous man, trying to arouse his neighbours from lethargy to freedom and happiness that he believed within their reach, and then, with the perspective of years to help us, look fairly at the main lines of his life and thought, which have been considered so strange and outré.

Consider the standards of education and religion in New England in Thoreau's youth, — the position of the churches, their distrust of the right of the individual to question the words of the Bible as interpreted by the Sects; the horror that Theodore Parker inspired, the shyness of the so-called Pagan Scriptures, the difficulty with which any one