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Such, at least, is the comment of the historian; but he makes no remark on the incredible levity of the Athenians, to whom the gravest interests of state were matter for mirth and pastime; and he has not a word of censure for Nicias and his "sober-minded" partisans, who, in their eagerness to ruin a political opponent, showed a criminal disregard for the welfare of Athens.
Of Miss Annie Eva Fay, however is not the very name fairy-like and fascinating? I read in one usually sober-minded journal that "there is something not of this earth about the young lady's powers." Another averred that she was "a spirit medium of remarkable and extraordinary power."
I enlarged on the extravagant fallacies involved in a fabulous "clairvoyance," which always failed when put to plain test by sober-minded examiners. I did not deny the effects of imagination on certain nervous constitutions. "Mesmerism could cure nobody; credulity could cure many. There was the well-known story of the old woman tried as a witch; she cured agues by a charm.
The marriage in the old days was arranged after this wise: The chief of one of the bands may have a marriageable daughter, and he may know of a young man, the son of a chief of another band, who is a brave warrior, of good character, sober-minded, steadfast, and trustworthy, who he thinks will make a good husband for his daughter and a good son-in-law.
"You'd better be a little more sober-minded!" laughed Hsi Jen. "What's the good of coming out with all these things?" Lin Tai-yue put out two of her fingers, and puckered up her lips. "Up to this," she laughed, "he's become a bonze twice. Henceforward, I'll try and remember how many times you make up your mind to become a Buddhist priest!"
Because she could not bear to turn away one needing help, she was always saving and scrimping so as to take care of more. One cannot wonder that she found life serious and solemn. Yet if only she had known how to laugh and forget her work sometimes, she might have done more good as well as been happier herself. From the first, Anne was a puzzle to the sober-minded lady.
And as Plato says, 'tis to no purpose for a sober-minded man to knock at the door of poesy: so Aristotle says, that no excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness; and he has reason to call all transports, how commendable soever, that surpass our own judgment and understanding, madness; forasmuch as wisdom is a regular government of the soul, which is carried on with measure and proportion, and for which she is to herself responsible.
But this excitement which alarms so many sober-minded people was not, after all, an element which vitiated the religious "movements" in the early ages of Christianity. There were rational Sadducees, learned scribes, and formal Pharisees, who were much displeased at the excitement of the multitude when Jesus made His triumphant entry into Jerusalem.
It is not only unhistoric in nearly all the very few alleged facts of the narrative, but it does great injustice to Patrick Henry by representing him virtually as a mere declaimer, as an ill-instructed though most impressive rhapsodist in debate, and as without any claim to the character of a serious statesman, or even of a man of affairs; while, by the somewhat grandiose and melodramatic tone of some portion of the narrative, it is singularly out of harmony with the real tone of that famous assemblage, an assemblage of Anglo-Saxon lawyers, politicians, and men of business, who were probably about as practical and sober-minded a company as had been got together for any manly undertaking since that of Runnymede.
He had dined out one day, and had brushed against some of the greatest men of the age, and felt himself brightened by the collision. He sat beside the most benevolent, the most enlightened, and the most sober-minded of political economists, on the one hand; on the other by the most brilliant of French conversationalists.
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