We must remember that dissatisfaction at existing evil (the feeling of all young and ardent minds), the struggle to escape from the |circumstance| of the evil world, has a carnal counterfeit -- the love of novelty, and self-will, and self-conceit, which may thrust us down into the abysses of misrule and uncertainty; as it has done such men as Shelley and Byron; trying vainly every loophole, beating against the prison bars of an imperfect system; neither degraded enough to make themselves a fool's paradise within it, nor wise enough to escape from it through Christ, |the door into the sheepfold,| to return when they will, and bring others with them into the serene empyrean of spiritual truth -- truth which explains, and arranges, and hallows, and subdues everything.
Letters and Memories. 1842.