Matthew Arnold, Civilization in the United States: First and Last Impressions of America.

[87] many of its members my esteem is not only sincere but also affectionate. I know how one's religious connections and religious attachments are determined by the circumstances of one's birth and bringing up; and probably, if I had been born and brought up among the Wesleyans, I should never have left their body. But certainly I should have wished my children to leave it; because to live with one's mind, in regard to a matter of absorbing importance as Wesleyans believe religion to be, to live with one's mind, as to a matter of this sort, fixed constantly upon a mind of the third order, such as was Mr. Wesley's, seems to me extremely trying and injurious for the minds of men in general. And people whose minds, in what is the chief concern of their lives, are thus constantly fixed upon a mind of the third order, are the staple of the population of the United States, in the small towns and country districts above all. Yet our Boston friend asks us to believe, that a population of which this is the staple can furnish what we cannot furnish, certainly, in England, and what no country that I know of can at present furnish,--a group, in every small town throughout the land, of people of good taste, good manners, good education, peers of any people in the world, reading the