Each mused over the particulars of the examination, and each viewed it
through the medium of his own feelings. Both were men of ready and acute
talent, and both were equally competent to combine various parts of
evidence, and to deduce from them the necessary conclusions. But the wide
difference of their habits and education often occasioned a great
discrepancy in their respective deductions from admitted premises.
Major Melville had been versed in camps and cities; he was vigilant by
profession and cautious from experience, had met with much evil in the
world, and therefore, though himself an upright magistrate and an
honourable man, his opinions of others were always strict, and sometimes
unjustly severe. Mr. Morton, on the contrary, had passed from the
literary pursuits of a college, where he was beloved by his companions
and respected by his teachers, to the ease and simplicity of his present
charge, where his opportunities of witnessing evil were few, and never
dwelt upon but in order to encourage repentance and amendment; and where
the love and respect of his parishioners repaid his affectionate zeal in
their behalf by endeavouring to disguise from him what they knew would
give him the most acute pain, namely, their own occasional transgressions
of the duties which it was the business of his life to recommend.
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