Burr looked thoughtful.
‘May I say one thing more?’ said Mary, the colour rising in her cheeks.
Burr looked at her with that smile that always drew out the confidence of every heart.
‘Mr. Burr,’ she said, ‘you will pardon me, but I cannot help saying this: You have, I am told, wholly renounced the Christian faith of your fathers, and build your whole life on quite another foundation. I cannot help feeling that this is a great and terrible mistake. I cannot help wishing that you would examine and reconsider.’
‘My dear child, I am extremely grateful to you for your remark, and appreciate fully the purity of the source from which it springs. Unfortunately, our intellectual beliefs are not subject to the control of our will. I have examined, and the examination has, I regret to say, not had the effect you would desire.’
Mary looked at him wistfully; he smiled and bowed, all himself again; and stopping at the door, he said, with a proud humility, ‘Do me the favour to present my devoted regard to your friend; believe me, that hereafter you shall have less reason to complain of me.’ He bowed and was gone.
An eye-witness of the scene has related that when Burr resigned his seat as president of his country’s senate, he was an object of peculiar political bitterness and obloquy. Almost all who listened to him had made up their minds that he was an utterly faithless, unprincipled man; and yet, such was his singular and peculiar personal power, that his short farewell address melted the whole assembly into tears; and his most embittered adversaries were charmed into a momentary enthusiasm of admiration.
It must not be wondered at, therefore, if our simple-hearted, loving Mary strangely found all her indignation against him gone, and herself little disposed to criticise the impassioned tenderness with which Madame de Frontignac still regarded him.
We have one thing more that we cannot avoid saying of two men so singularly in juxtaposition, as Aaron Burr and Dr. Hopkins.
Both had a perfect logic of life, and guided themselves with an inflexible rigidity by it. Burr assumed individual pleasure to be the great object of human existence; and Dr. Hopkins placed it in a life altogether beyond self. Burr rejected all sacrifice, Hopkins considered sacrifice as the foundation of all existence. To live as far as possible without a disagreeable sensation was an object which Burr proposed to himself as the summum bonum, for which he drilled down and subjugated a nature of singular richness. Hopkins, on the other hand, smoothed the asperities of a temperament naturally violent and fiery by a rigid discipline, which guided it entirely above the plane of self-indulgence; and, in the pursuance of their great end, the one watched against his better nature as the other did against his worse. It is but fair, then, to take their lives as the practical workings of their respective ethical creeds.