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This hardening process of the heart, such as God claims as his work, is only the developing of the real character, which character we have previously acquired by our own voluntary acts, while we have the liberty to choose for ourselves either the good or evil. But when we have reached a certain point, the ability to choose good is taken from us, so that we can then only choose evil. God is then in his way hardening the heart.

CHAPTER XXXVII.
The Imputation of Insanity a Barrier to Human Progress.

At one time I was made to feel exceedingly sad and sorrowful by a conversation I had with a lady who called upon me. I conversed freely and frankly with her, as usual, avowing my views and sentiments, and giving my reasons for the course I was pursuing.

In her undeveloped condition she failed to comprehend them fully, and therefore, since the brand of insanity was upon me, she concluded these points which she could not readily comprehend, were products of my insanity!

This, from her standpoint, being an inevitable conclusion, her mind would necessarily be barred against any convictions of truth which I might present to her reason or intelligence. These goggles of insanity through which she now looks, disturb all her mental vision, so that she can no more apprehend a new truth through me, as its medium, than the scales of bigotry will admit any light through those who war with its dogmas.

Now, supposing this position should be generally adopted, viz.: that what we cannot readily apprehend, is insanity; what encouragement have we to make progress, or become the benefactors of our age, knowing that just as soon as we advance to any point of intelligence beyond another, we must be regarded and treated as insane, and thus expose ourselves to a life-long imprisonment unless we recant?

Is not the imputation of insanity the devil's barrier to human progress?

I feel that we ought to be very careful not to condemn what we do not understand, for in Christ's case, his persecutors were condemned as guilty of "blasphemy," for doing this very thing.

The blinded Jews, who were wedded to their creed with as firm a tenacity as the Orthodox Church of the present day is to their own, could not therefore apprehend the principles of the new dispensation, which Christ came to introduce, because it conflicted with their church creed; therefore they accused this innovator with madness or insanity for promulgating such new and strange doctrines.

Like the same class at the present age, they did not wait to see evidence of his insanity in his evil actions, before they condemned him; but merely for his expression or utterance of opinions, he was condemned as a madman.

Now I think his accusers acted more like madmen than he did, when we come to take actions as evidence of insanity, instead of the expression of opinions. And even if we take their own basis of evidence, I think the Jewish dogmas which their church defended were as great an evidence of insanity in them, as the opinions which Christ taught in opposition to their standard of morals, were evidence of insanity in him.

But I do not think that the utterance of opinions in either case, is any evidence of insanity.

The Jews believed they had received their dispensation from God, and, of course, they were tenacious in its defense, and could not readily see that the time had come for the old to give place to the new.

So it is in all ages, some are slower than others to see that the time for the inauguration of any new truth has fully come, and therefore they oppose it with the same intolerant spirit which the Jewish ministers did.

But so far as the question of insanity goes, they show the greatest proof of being insane, who oppose this inauguration With vile slander, and ruinous scandal, and false imprisonment, and death, rather than those who calmly stand by the truth and defend it with sound and invincible logic.

It was this very inoffensiveness in Christ which so exasperated them against him, plainly allowing that it was they who had the devil of bigotry in them, not him. It was they the Jewish ministers, who were the blasphemers, instead of him whom they accused of blasphemy.

The views and theories taught by Christ, were all humanitarian in their character; yet this did not shield him from the assaults of slander and the charge of insanity; neither will this armor prove a defense at the present age, even under the American flag of free religious toleration, so long as reformers are allowed to be publicly branded by these insane asylums.

Whoever has the diploma of this institution forced upon him, must submit henceforth to fight his way through fire and blood to carry out his benevolent purposes to humanity; for at every inch of progress, he is compelled to face the barbed arrow of insanity hurled at him by the intolerant and bigoted of his age. If by any possible means, the imputation of insanity can be removed from the track of the reformer, the wheel of human progress will be greatly accelerated.