No disinterestedness about doing right, for nobody can be so much interested in the act as the doer of it.
Wrong-doing is the only possible self-abnegation, of which the whole range of thought admits.
All the humiliation and agony of the Saviour himself, were necessary to himself. Nothing less could have expressed the infinite love of the Divine nature; and in working out a most perfect righteousness for those he loved, he also wrought out a most perfect happiness for himself.
The eternal law of God links the happiness of all the creatures made in His image in an electric chain, united in the Divine love; and He, who has "a fellow-feeling for our infirmities," has given us a fellow-feeling with the sufferings of each other. So that no soul in which the Divine image is not totally obscured, can know of the misery of another, without a sympathetic throb of sorrow.
The true heart in Maine cannot know that the slave-mother in Georgia is weeping for her children, torn from her arms by avarice, without feeling her anguish palpitating in its inmost core.
It is the pulsations of the sympathetic heart which stretches out the hand to interfere between her and her aggressor; and abolitionists are just seeking a soft pillow that they may "sleep o' nights."
It is selfishness, I tell you, all selfishness! The great whale when she gives up her own large life to protect her young one, and the little wren when she carries all the nice tit bits to her babies, are as true to themselves as the old pig when she shoulders all her little family out of the trough.
The whale enjoys death, and the wren her little fellows' supper, with a better zest than an old grunter does her corn, and Wm. Gildersten in spending money and laboring to prevent any more scenes of brutal violence in his State, by punishing the one past, gratifies his own loves and longings quite as much as Judge Grier in grunting out his wrath against all lovers of liberty.
The one would enjoy being hanged for the cause of God and Humanity, more than the other would the luxury of hanging him, even if he could have all the pleasure to himself,—be not only judge and persecutor, as he prefers, but marshal, jailor, and hangman to boot.
More than this, every creature, so far as other creatures are concerned, has a right to be happy in his own way. Nero had as much right to wish for power to cut off all the heads in Italy at one blow, as an innocent pig to wish for capacity to eat all the corn in the world. Mankind has no right to punish either for the desire or its manifestation. They should only make fences to prevent the accomplishment of the wish.