Excerpt from Walt Whitman (the Camden Sage) As Religious and Moral Teacher

This essay, the last in the recently published volume, "Modern Poet Prophets, " appears by itself alone for such as desire to see nothing between cover and cover but an honest attempt to remove obstacles of prejudice from the path of him who would seriously approach our Titan.

Few like to admit that they have been converted. It is a dangerous admission. It implies the possibility of further conversion. We forget that firmness, obstinate tenacity, virtues in conduct are vices in thought. To be ever ready to change when superior reasons are against us, is just that unchangeable loyalty to truth we commend. We must abandon the lower round of the ladder for the higher, be constantly inconstant, if we would mount.

It may seem a questionable expedient to print in the Appendix extracts from an insolent critique. Still, the extracts when hostile, are so ferocious as to condemn themselves. They will, however serve to prove that the writer of this essay went through the usual phases of amazement, horror, indignation, fury, exasperation, disapproval, qualified dislike, qualified liking, till at length he is forced by common honesty to confess himself an ardent lover of much that our great American champion of Democracy, political and spiritual, has written.

For my own part, I am not coward enough to be afraid to own my whole-hearted loyalty to the teacher, even though I may difler from him on many points deemed cardinal by most men. He himself desires us to be independent of him. He bids us not "look through his eyes, " but our own.

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