University of Virginia Library

MARGARET TO ANNA.

Our Sabbaths are delightful days; they always were to me;
because I did not have to go to Meeting; now, because I do
go. They were ever, liberty, rest and recreation to me, now
they bring a higher spiritual enjoyment. We go to Church,
forenoon and afternoon, and sometimes dine in the Village, at
Frank's, or elsewhere. In Summer we walk, in Winter ride.
We all go, Pa, Ma, Hash and Nimrod, with their families, and
whoever is living with us. There is a mellowness about the
sky and air, that day; which is all the difference I perceive.
People tell me what a drearily solemn day, it used to be to
them. “It was a despit pinched up sort of a time,” said Mrs.
Whiston to me awhile since, “as if God was asleep and we had
to go tip-toe all day, and couldn't speak above our breath for
fear of waking him.” We all carry flowers to Church, not
quite so extravagant a bunch as I once got a rebuke for. The
death of Deacon Hadlock, and the infirmities of Parson Welles,
have quite thinned off the old society, and Christ-Church includes
almost the whole town. Indeed, the old Parson himself,
with such of his flock as chose to accompany him, was at
our Church, a few Sabbaths since. Zenas Joy is our chorister,
and Dorothy Tapley, who has fine musical powers, plays the
organ. One half of the hymns are sung by the whole congregation;
this, Deacon Ramsdill says, is as it used to be, and so
the old folks are pleased, and the young ones too. The Feast
of the Lord's Supper occurs every month. Our Communion
days are so Christ-giving, so abounding in what some are wont
to call soul-food, so contributory to the Divine Atonement,
they seem almost the best days. We all eat that bread and
drink that wine whereby we mean to show the Lord's death
until he come; that is, as our Bishop says, until Christ perfectly
comes in our souls, and over the earth. The children
many of them are Communicants; the excellent teaching they
have in the Sunday school, prepares them for this higher
Church order. At noon, the people go into the Cemetery, and
eat their dinner on the seats near the Brook Kedron. At night,
scores and sometimes hundreds come to Mons Christi, visit the
Cross, walk about our grounds; sometimes they come into our
drawing-room, where we have religious conversation, and sing
hymns. How much there is in the religion of Christ to talk
about, and I have become sanctiloquent as any of them. That
word Love, of which St. John says, he who has it dwells in
God and God in him, how much there is in it! It has already
given us a new Heaven and a new Earth, and goes on creating

stars, nebulae and milky ways, without number. It would astonish
you, Anna, to hear some whom you would consider most jejune
and sterile, talk. The graces of the Spirit, joy, love,
peace, goodness, &c., have thrown up tropical islands in these
wastes of brine. I shall have many things to tell you, more
than I can write.—Last Sunday, Obed brought his child to
be baptized. It received the name Bartholomew Elliman!
The Master and the Widow, I understand, have made peace,
or suspended hostilities. The Master promised an annuity to
the child if it might be named from him. Frankly, Anna, I
must confess, the Widow is the most purely selfish woman I
ever heard of. Some would get drunk, some were bigots,
some fanatics, some intolerant, but all had a spice of honesty
at the bottom. But she is a hypocrite to the core. She has
given me some trouble, and done me some good, perhaps; for
which all thanks. An ambitious avarice has been her ruling
passion. Will you believe it, the day of the Erection of the
Cross, when we were having the sacrament in the woods, she
was there, so they say, with her pockets filled with her Nommernisstortumbug,
which she endeavored to truck among the
people. Nimrod never could endure her; he always said she
followed Church-going the same as black-birds do the
plough, to pick up the worms. Our Bishop has had a sober
talk with her, as every good Christian should do. And this
admonishes me, that I perhaps am somewhat at fault in what I
say. I have dealt too roundly with her. Words do so cover
the whole field of our vision while the object shall go half naked.
He says she has some incorrupt nature, that she is not wholly
dead in the old Adam, sin: and declares that Christ may yet
make her live. He says, Christ and the Gospels are sufficient
to destroy any amount, and any inveteracy of evil, in the heart.
If the Leech can be touched, we must all believe so too. The
Bishop says the Gospel must find something in our natures
similar to itself before it can have effect; that roots feel
feel their way into the earth in search of nutriment, homogeneous
and corresponding, each root for itself, that of wheat for one
substance, and that of sorrel for another; so he says the Gospel
feels its way in the human heart. As music addresses and develops
the musical sentiment, so Evangelical love and truth address
and develop the sentiment of love and truth. In this way he
acts; he gains access to the heart, makes sure that the floor
will hold him, then commences an onslaught on the unclean
spirits, drives them out, with old Adam at their head; brushes
away the dust and cobwebs of meanness; opens the shutters,
and lets in the light of God, and the clear shining of the Sun
of Righteousness. Such are many of the wonders God hath
wrought by him in Livingston! Can he succeed with the
Widow? In all countries moss grows, the ice-bolstered rocks
of the Arctic are green and soft with it. There the merganser
spends its summer, the snowbird rears its young, and
our own robin sings. Shall we despair then of these temperate
regions? The Master says Whitfield did more to
puppetize and dehumanize New Englanders than any other
man; that he seized upon the idea of total depravity and
sowed it broad cast in the Churches; and that Parson Welles,
while he agreed with him in doctrine, was so averse from his
measures, that he would never have him in Livingston. This
for your private benefit, Anna. You ask many questions
about matters and things, and I can only return you such
answers as I am able to pick up. Address your next inquiries
to Mr. Evelyn; he will give you more satisfaction. When
our troops went to the attack of Louisburg, Whitfield gave
them this motto, “Nil desperandum, Christo Duce;” an admirable
one for our own flag.—I am forgetting, like many
other sinners, the Sabbath. It is the Lord's Day to us; in the
most exalted sense, it is Christ's own day. All days are holy,
this seems to be the cream of the week. On the spiritual
river where we would ever sail, the Sabbath opens into clearer
water, a broader bay; and we can rest on our oars to get a
distincter view of the blue heavenly hills whither we tend.
Is it not a good thing, this hebdomadal renovation of skin and
clothes? You know the old saw; “Cleanliness is next to
Godliness.” Our Bishop preaches on cleanliness, carnal and
spiritual; and if it be a true sign, I think you would count us
a very godly people. Houses, rooms, yards, fences, streets, as
well as persons, in all parts of the town, look wonderfully
clean, neat, tidy; No. 4 would grace Hyde Park. You would
also see, on the Sabbath conspicuously, greater simplicity in
dress; there is taste and some ornament; but “gaudy apparel,”
has almost entirely disappeared, “as unbecoming those
who profess Godliness.” That transition in fashion with
which a foreign connection so afflicts your city, is here neither
frequent nor abrupt. In an intermixture of styles from one
season to another, the variety is not sufficiently marked to
prevent our wearing out the old without disquiet, or adopting
the new at our convenience.

The other night at a party at our house, Deacon Bowker

danced with Miss Amy, I should say Mrs. Elliman; a thing
she has not done this two score years. Col. Welch said he
was falling into his second childhood by renewing his youth,
sooner than he anticipated. A dance on cold water he pronounced
strange, but excellent. Deacon Ramsdill declared
he should live an hundred years. “It's sheer nater,” said he,
“it is just like soap, the longer you keep it, the better it
grows.” If Chilion could only play for us! William Beach
proves a first rate violinist, so does Abiah Tapley.

We make much of music, and it does well by us. I wish
to see unfolded and embodied the entire musical capability of
the town. We have an instrumental company called The
Chilion Band. They play on the Green, Summer evenings,
and in the Cemetery; they have gone to Breakneck, Snakehill
and all parts of the town. They frequently come to Mons
Christi, play in our groves, and on the Head. The effect of
this last is indescribable. It reaches the village, and the
inspiring melodies, like morning light, irradiate over wood,
valley and mountain. Mr. Evelyn has written some Christian
Hymns, very beautiful, and combining some lyric fire. These
hymns you will hear in many a house, in the fields, and the
children sing them at school.

Our Schools are doing well. There were formerly but two
in town, we have now six. Hancock Welles, grandson of the
Parson, after he left College, was engaged for a permanent
teacher in the Grammar School, for which a new and commodious
house was erected on the Green, in place of the one
that was burnt.