one, has earned the right to “wrap the drapery of her couch about” her, “and lie down to pleasant” rest, if not “dreams.”
“What an insult it is to our best moral faculties,” she says, in one of her letters to Mr. Atkinson, “to hold over us the promises and threats of heaven and hell, as if there were nothing in us higher than selfish hope and fear!”
And again: “If we feel a contentment in our own lot, which must be sound because it is derived from no special administration of our own affairs, but from the impartial and necessary operations of Nature, we cannot but feel, for the same reason, a new exhilaration on account of the unborn multitudes who will ages hence enter upon existence on better terms than those on which we hold it. It is a pleasant thing to have a daily purpose of raising and disciplining ourselves, for no end of selfish purchase or ransom, but from the instinctive tendency to mental and moral health.”
