Husband and wife glanced at one another, both smiling with self-satisfaction, and each mentally claiming the honor of this visit.
The blue-gray bandy legged dog ran merrily along the side of the road, sometimes in proof of its agility and self-satisfaction lifting one hind leg and hopping along on three, and then again going on all four and rushing to bark at the crows that sat on the carrion.
But be this as it may, he had no sooner adopted his new creed than he resolved to profess it; " a momentary glow of enthusiasm " had raised him above all temporal considerations, and accordingly, on June 8, 1753, he records that having " privately abjured the heresies" of his childhood before a Catholic priest of the name of Baker, a Jesuit, in London, he announced the same to his father in an elaborate controversial epistle which his spiritual adviser much approved, and which he himself afterwards described to Lord Sheffield as having been " written with all the pomp, the dignity, and self-satisfaction of a martyr."
From 1855 to 1860 he was pastor of a new Unitarian society in Jersey City, where he gave up the Lord's Supper, thinking that it ministered to self-satisfaction; and it was as a radical Unitarian that he became pastor of another young church in New York City in 1860.
Not only did his reason not reproach him for what he had done, but he even found cause for self-satisfaction in having so successfully contrived to avail himself of a convenient opportunity to punish a criminal and at the same time pacify the mob.