Hollingsworth Zenobia Priscilla

I loved Hollingsworth, as has already been enough expressed. But it
impressed me, more and more, that there was a stern and dreadful
peculiarity in this man, such as could not prove otherwise than
pernicious to the happiness of those who should be drawn into too
intimate a connection with him. He was not altogether human. There
was something else in Hollingsworth besides flesh and blood, and
sympathies and affections and celestial spirit.

This is always true of those men who have surrendered themselves to an
overruling purpose. It does not so much impel them from without, nor
even operate as a motive power within, but grows incorporate with all
that they think and feel, and finally converts them into little else
save that one principle. When such begins to be the predicament, it is
not cowardice, but wisdom, to avoid these victims. They have no heart,
no sympathy, no reason, no conscience. They will keep no friend,
unless he make himself the mirror of their purpose; they will smite and
slay you, and trample your dead corpse under foot, all the more
readily, if you take the first step with them, and cannot take the
second, and the third, and every other step of their terribly strait
path.

They have an idol to which they consecrate themselves
high-priest, and deem it holy work to offer sacrifices of whatever is
most precious; and never once seem to suspect--so cunning has the Devil
been with them--that this false deity, in whose iron features,
immitigable to all the rest of mankind, they see only benignity and
love, is but a spectrum of the very priest himself, projected upon the
surrounding darkness. And the higher and purer the original object,
and the more unselfishly it may have been taken up, the slighter is the
probability that they can be led to recognize the process by which
godlike benevolence has been debased into all-devouring egotism.