with doubts and difficulties, making sure and clear its footing, before calling upon society to follow. Its opponents—socialists of every grade—leaping blindfold to their conclusions, and taking impulse for inspiration, recklessly drag on their devotees from one wild dream to another, until
“Contention, like a horse,
Full of high feeding, madly doth break loose,
And bears down all before him.”
They do not mean the evil which they do. Very possibly, their hearts are of the purest—but their ideas, unfortunately, not of the clearest. Without examining into the practicability of their own schemes, they give way to a misty vision of goodness—a kind of foggy virtue—which, often but the rush-light of their own unregulated fancy—too indolent or too cowardly to probe to its source, and follow to its end—they imagine an inward light, a transmitted beam of heaven, and so dream on!
