University of Virginia Library

MY dear Brother: — Since I wrote you last, so strange
a change has taken place in my life that even now I
walk about as in a dream, and hardly know myself. The events
of a few hours have made everything in the world seem to me
as different from what it ever seemed before as death is from
life.

Not to keep you waiting, after so solemn a preface, I will announce
to you first, briefly, what it is, and then, secondly, how
it happened.

Well, then, I have adopted a child, in my dry and wilted old
age. She is a beautiful and engaging little creature, full of life
and spirits, — full of warm affections, — thrown an absolute waif
and stray on the sands of life. Her mother was an unknown
Englishwoman, — probably some relict of the retired English
army. She died in great destitution, in the neighboring town
of Needmore, leaving on the world two singularly interesting
children, a boy and a girl. They were, of course, taken in
charge by the parish, and fell to the lot of old Crab Smith and
his sister, Miss Asphyxia, — just think of it! I think I need
say no more than this about their lot.

In a short time they ran away from cruel treatment; lived
in a desolate little housekeeping way in the old Dench house;
till finally Sam Lawson, lounging about in his general and universal
way, picked them up. He brought them, of course, where
every wandering, distressed thing comes, — to Deacon Badger's.

Now I suppose the Deacon is comfortably off in the world, as
our New England farmers go, but his ability to maintain general
charges of housekeeping for all mankind may seriously be
doubted. Lois Badger, who does the work of Martha in that

establishment, came over to me, yesterday afternoon, quite distressed
in her mind about it. Lois is a worthy creature, —
rather sharp, to be sure, but, when her edge is turned the right
way, none the worse for that, — and really I thought she had
the right of it, to some extent.

People in general are so resigned to have other folks made
burnt sacrifices, that it did not appear to me probable that there
was a creature in Oldtown who would do anything more than
rejoice that Deacon Badger felt able to take the children. After
I had made some rather bitter reflections on the world, and its
selfishness, in the style that we all practise, the thought suddenly
occurred to me, What do you, more than others? and that idea,
together with the beauty and charms of the poor little waif, decided
me to take this bold step. I shut my eyes, and took it, —
not without quaking in my shoes for fear of Polly; but I have
carried my point in her very face, without so much as saying
by your leave.

The little one has just been taken up stairs and tucked up
warmly in my own bed, with one of our poor little Emily's old
nightgowns on. They fit her exactly, and I exult over her as
one that findeth great spoil.

Polly has not yet declared herself, except by slamming the
door very hard when she first made the discovery of the child's
presence in the house. I presume there is an equinoctial gale
gathering, but I say nothing; for, after all, Polly is a good
creature, and will blow herself round into the right quarter, in
time, as our northeast rain-storms generally do. People always
accommodate themselves to certainties.

I cannot but regard the coming of this child to me at this time
as a messenger of mercy from God, to save me from sinking into
utter despair. I have been so lonely, so miserable, so utterly,
inexpressibly wretched of late, that it has seemed that, if something
did not happen to help me, I must lose my reason. Our
family disposition to melancholy is a hard enough thing to manage
under the most prosperous circumstances. I remember my
father's paroxysms of gloom: they used to frighten me when
I was a little girl, and laid a heavy burden on the heart of our

dear angel mother. Whatever that curse is, we all inherit it.
In the heart of every one of us children there is that fearful
black drop, like that which the Koran says the angel showed to
Mahomet. It is an inexplicable something which always predisposes
us to sadness, but in which any real, appreciable sorrow
strikes a terribly deep and long root. Shakespeare describes this
thing, as he does everything else: —
You have struggled with it by the most rational means, — an
active out-of-door life, by sea voyages and severe manual labor.
A man can fight this dragon as a woman cannot. We women
are helpless, — tied to places, forms, and rules, — chained to our
stake. We must meet him as we can.

Of late I have not been able to sleep, and, lying awake all
night long in darkness and misery, have asked, if this be life,
whether an immortal existence is not a curse to be feared, rather
than a blessing to be hoped, and if the wretchedness we fear
in the eternal world can be worse than what we sometimes suffer
now, — such sinking of heart, such helplessness of fear, such a
vain calling for help that never comes. Well, I will not live
it over again, for I dare say you know it all too well. I think
I finally wore myself out in trying to cheer poor brother Theodore's
darksome way down to death. Can you wonder that
he would take opium? God alone can judge people that
suffer as he did, and, let people say what they please, I must,
I will, think that God has some pity for the work of his hands.

Now, brother, I must, I will, write to you about Emily;
though you have said you never wished to hear her name again.
What right had you, her brother, to give her up so, and to let
the whole burden of this dreadful mystery and sorrow come
down on me alone? You are not certain that she has gone
astray in the worst sense that a woman can. We only know
that she has broken away from us and gone, — but where, how,

and with whom, you cannot say, nor I. And certainly there
was great excuse for her. Consider how the peculiar temperament
and constitution of our family wrought upon her. Consider
the temptations of her wonderful beauty, her highly nervous,
wildly excitable organization. Her genius was extraordinary;
her strength and vigor of character quite as much so. Altogether,
she was a perilously constituted human being, — and what
did we do with her? A good, common girl might have been put
with Uncle and Aunt Farnsworth with great advantage. We
put her there for the simple reason that they were her aunt and
uncle, and had money enough to educate her. But in all other
respects they were about the most unsuited that could be conceived.
I must say that I think that glacial, gloomy, religious
training in Uncle Farnsworth's family was, for her, peculiarly
unfortunate. She sat from Sunday to Sunday under Dr. Stern's
preaching. With a high-keyed, acute mind, she could not help
listening and thinking; and such thinking is unfortunate, to say
the least.

It always seemed to me that he was one of those who experiment
on the immortal soul as daring doctors experiment on the
body, — using the most violent and terrible remedies, — remedies
that must kill or cure. His theory was, that a secret enemy to
God was lying latent in every soul, which, like some virulent poisons
in the body, could only be expelled by being brought to the
surface; and he had sermon after sermon, whose only object appeared
to be to bring into vivid consciousness what he calls the
natural opposition of the human heart.

But, alas! in some cases the enmity thus aroused can never
be subdued; and Emily's was a nature that would break before
it would bow. Nothing could have subdued her but love, — and
love she never heard. These appalling doctrines were presented
with such logical clearness, and apparently so established from
the Scriptures, that, unable to distinguish between the word
of God and the cruel deductions of human logic, she trod both
under foot in defiant despair. Then came in the French literature,
which is so fascinating, and which just now is having
so wide an influence on the thinking of our country. Rousseau

and Voltaire charmed her, and took her into a new world. She
has probably gone to France for liberty, with no protection but
her own virgin nature. Are we at once to infer the worst, when
we know so little? I, for one, shall love her and trust in her
to the end; and if ever she should fall, and do things that I and
all the world must condemn, I shall still say, that it will be less
her fault than that of others; that she will be one of those who
fall by their higher, rather than their lower nature.

I have a prophetic instinct in my heart that some day, poor,
forlorn, and forsaken, she will look back with regret to the old
house where she was born: and then she shall be welcome
here. This is why I keep this solitary old place, full of bitter
and ghostly memories; because, as long as I keep it, there is
one refuge that Emily may call her own, and one heart that will
be true to her, and love her and believe in her to the end.

I think God has been merciful to me in sending me this child,
to be to me as a daughter. Already her coming has been made
a means of working in me that great moral change for which all
my life I have been blindly seeking. I have sought that conversion
which our father taught us to expect as alchemists seek
the philosopher's stone.

What have I not read and suffered at the hands of the theologians?
How many lonely hours, day after day, have I bent the
knee in fruitless prayer that God would grant me this great,
unknown grace! for without it how dreary is life!

We are in ourselves so utterly helpless, — life is so hard, so
inexplicable, that we stand in perishing need of some helping
hand, some sensible, appreciable connection with God. And yet
for years every cry of misery, every breath of anguish, has
been choked by the logical proofs of theology; — that God is my
enemy, or that I am his; that every effort I make toward Him
but aggravates my offence; and that this unknown gift, which no
child of Adam ever did compass of himself, is so completely in
my own power, that I am every minute of my life to blame for
not possessing it.

How many hours have I gone round and round this dreary
track, — chilled, weary, shivering, seeing no light, and hearing

no voice! But within this last hour it seems as if a divine ray
had shone upon me, and the great gift had been given me by the
hand of a little child. It came in the simplest and most unexpected
manner, while listening to a very homely hymn, repeated
by this dear little one. The words themselves were not much
in the way of poetry; it was merely the simplest statement of
the truth that in Jesus Christ, ever living, ever present, every
human soul has a personal friend, divine and almighty.

This thought came over me with such power, that it seemed as
if all my doubts, all my intricate, contradictory theologies, all
those personal and family sorrows which had made a burden on
my soul greater than poor Christian ever staggered under, had
gone where his did, when, at the sight of the Cross, it loosed
from his back and rolled down into the sepulchre, to be seen no
more. Can it be, I asked myself, that this mighty love, that I
feel so powerfully and so sweetly, has been near me all these dark,
melancholy years? Has the sun been shining behind all these
heavy clouds, under whose shadows I have spent my life?

When I laid my little Tina down to sleep to-night, I came
down here to think over this strange, new thought, — that I,
even I, in my joyless old age, my poverty, my perplexities, my
loneliness, am no longer alone! I am beloved. There is One
who does love me, — the One Friend, whose love, like the sunshine,
can be the portion of each individual of the human race,
without exhaustion. This is the great mystery of faith, which
I am determined from this hour to keep whole and undefiled.

My dear brother, I have never before addressed to you a word
on this subject. It has been one in which I saw only perplexity.
I have, it is true, been grieved and disappointed that you did not
see your way clear to embrace the sacred ministry, which has
for so many generations been the appointed work of our family.
I confess for many years I did hope to see you succeed, not
only to the library, but to the work of our honored, venerated
father and grandfather. It was my hope that, in this position, I
should find in you a spiritual guide to resolve my doubts and lead
me aright. But I have gathered from you at times, by chance
words dropped, that you could not exactly accept the faith of our

fathers. Perhaps difficulties like my own have withheld you.
I know you too well to believe that the French scepticism that
has blown over here with the breath of our political revolution
can have had the least influence over you. Whatever your
views of doctrines may be, you are not a doubter. You are
not — as poor Emily defiantly called herself — a deist, an alien
from all that our fathers came to this wilderness to maintain.
Yet when I see you burying your talents in a lonely mountain
village, satisfied with the work of a poor schoolmaster, instead
of standing forth to lead our New England in the pulpit, I ask
myself, Why is this?

Speak to me, brother! tell me your innermost thoughts, as I
have told you mine. Is not life short and sad and bitter enough,
that those who could help each other should neglect the few
things they can do to make it tolerable? Why do we travel
side by side, lonely and silent, — each, perhaps, hiding in that
silence the bread of life that the other needs? Write to me as
I have written to you, and let me know that I have a brother
in soul, as I have in flesh.

My dear Sister: — I have read your letter. Answer it
justly and truly how can I? How little we know of each other
in outside intimacy! but when we put our key into the door of
the secret chamber, who does not tremble and draw back? —
that is the true haunted chamber!

First, about Emily, I will own I am wrong. It is from no
want of love, though, but from too much. I was and am too sore
and bitter on that subject to trust myself. I have a heart full of
curses, but don't know exactly where to fling them; and, for
aught I see, we are utterly helpless. Every clew fails; and what
is the use of torturing ourselves? It is a man's nature to act,
to do, and, where nothing can be done, to forget. It is a woman's
nature to hold on to what can only torture, and live all her despairs
over. Women's tears are their meat; men find the diet too salt,
and won't take it.

Tell me anything I can do, and I 'll do it; but talk I cannot, —
every word burns me. I admit every word you say of Emily.
We were mistaken in letting her go to the Farnsworths, and be
baited and tortured with ultra-Calvinism; but we were blind, as
we mortals always are, — fated never to see what we should have
done, till seeing is too late.

I am glad you have taken that child, — first, because it 's a
good deed in itself, and, secondly, because it 's good for you. That
it should have shed light on your relations to God is strictly philosophical.
You have been trying to find your way to Him by
definitions and by logic; one might as well make love to a lady
by the first book of Euclid. “He that loveth not his brother
whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not
seen?” That throb of protecting, all-embracing love which
thrilled through your heart for this child taught you more of
God than father's whole library. “He that loveth not knoweth
not God.” The old Bible is philosophical, and eminent for its
common sense. Of course this child will make a fool of you.
Never mind; the follies of love are remedial.

As to a system of education, it will be an amusement for you
to get that up. Every human being likes to undertake to dictate
for some other one. Go at it with good cheer. But, whatever
you do, don't teach her French. Give her a good Saxon-English
education; and, if she needs a pasture-land of foreign languages.
let her learn Latin, and, more than that, Greek. Greek is the
morning-land of languages, and has the freshness of early dew
in it which will never exhale.

The French helped us in our late war: for that I thank
them; but from French philosophy and French democracy, may
the good Lord deliver us. They slew their Puritans in the
massacre of St. Bartholomew, and the nation ever since has been
without a moral sense. French literature is like an eagle with
one broken wing. What the Puritans did for us English people,
in bringing in civil liberty, they lacked. Our revolutions have
been gradual. I predict that theirs will come by and by with an
explosion.

Meanwhile, our young men who follow after French literature

become rakes and profligates. Their first step in liberty is
to repeal the ten commandments, especially the seventh. Therefore
I consider a young woman in our day misses nothing who
does not read French. Decorous French literature is stupid, and
bright French literature is too wicked for anything. So let
French alone.

She threatens to be pretty, does she? So much the worse
for you and her. If she makes you too much trouble by and by,
send her up to my academy, and I will drill her, and make a
Spartan of her.

As to what you say about religion, and the ministry, and the
schoolmaster, what can I say on this sheet of paper? Briefly
then. No, I am not in any sense an unbeliever in the old Bible;
I would as soon disbelieve my own mother. And I am in my nature
a thorough Puritan. I am a Puritan as thoroughly as a hound
is a hound, and a pointer a pointer, whose pedigree of unmixed
blood can be traced for generations back. I feel within me the
preaching instinct, just as the hound snuffs, and the pointer
points; but as to the pulpit in these days, — well, thereby hangs
a tale.

What should I preach, supposing I were a minister, as my
father, and grandfather, and great-grandfather were before me?
What they preached was true to them, was fitted for their
times, was loyally and sincerely said, and of course did a
world of good. But when I look over their sermons, I put an
interrogation point to almost everything they say; and what was
true to them is not true to me; and if I should speak out as
honestly as they did what is true to me, the world would not understand
or receive it, and I think it would do more harm than
good. I believe I am thinking ahead of the present generation,
and if I should undertake to push my thoughts I should only
bother people, — just as one of my bright boys in the latter part
of the algebra sometimes worries a new beginner with his advanced
explanations.

Then again, our late Revolution has wrought a change in the
ministry that will soon become more and more apparent. The
time when ministers were noblemen by divine right, and reigned

over their parishes by the cocked hat and gold-headed cane, is
passing away. Dr. Lothrop, and Dr. Stern, and a few others,
keep up the prestige, but that sort of thing is going by; and in
the next generation the minister will be nothing but a citizen; his
words will come without prestige, and be examined and sifted
just like the words of any other citizen.

There is a race of ministers rising up who are fully adequate
to meet this exigency; and these men are going to throw Calvinism
down into the arena, and discuss every inch of it, hand to
hand and knee to knee, with the common people; and we shall
see what will come of this.

I, for my part, am not prepared to be a minister on these
terms. Still, as I said, I have the born instinct of preaching; I
am dictatorial by nature, and one of those who need constantly to
see themselves reflected in other people's eyes; and so I have
got an academy here, up in the mountains, where I have a set
of as clear, bright-eyed, bright-minded boys and girls as you
would wish to see, and am in my way a pope. Well, I enjoy being
a pope. It is one of my weaknesses.

As to society, we have the doctor, — a quiet little wrinkled old
man, a profound disbeliever in medicines, who gives cream-of-tartar
for ordinary cases, and camomile tea when the symptoms
become desperate, and reads Greek for his own private amusement.
Of course he does n't get very rich, but here in the
mountains one can afford to be poor. One of our sunsets is worth
half a Boston doctor's income.

Then there 's the lawyer and squire, who draws the deeds, and
makes the wills, and settles the quarrels; and the minister, who
belongs to the new dispensation. He and I are sworn friends;
he is my Fidus Achates. His garden joins mine, and when I am
hoeing my corn he is hoeing his, and thence comes talk. As it
gets more eager I jump the fence and hoe in his garden, or he
does the same to mine. We have a strife on the matter of garden
craft, who shall with most skill outwit our Mother Nature, and get
cantelopes and melons under circumstances in which she never
intended them to grow. This year I beat the parson, but I can
see that he is secretly resolved to revenge himself on me when

the sweet corn comes in. One evening every week we devote to
reading the newspaper and settling the affairs of the country. We
are both stanch Federalists, and make the walls ring with our
denunciations of Jacobinism and Democracy. Once a month we
have the Columbian Magazine and the foreign news from Europe,
and then we have a great deal on our hands; we go over affairs,
every country systematically, and settle them for the month. In
general we are pretty well agreed, but now and then our lines of
policy differ, and then we fight it out with good courage, not
sparing the adjectives. The parson has a sly humor of his own,
and our noisiest discussions generally end in a hearty laugh.

So much for the man and friend, — now for the clergyman.
He is neither the sentimental, good parson of Goldsmith, nor the
plaintive, ascetic parish priest of Romanism, nor the cocked
hat of the theocracy, but a lively, acute, full-blooded man, who
does his duty on equal terms among men. He is as single-hearted
as an unblemished crystal, and in some matters sacredly
simple; but yet not without a thrifty practical shrewdness, both
in things temporal and things spiritual. He has an income of
about two hundred and fifty dollars, with his wood. The farmers
about here consider him as rolling in wealth, and I must say that,
though the parsonage is absolutely bare of luxuries, one is not
there often unpleasantly reminded that the parson is a poor man.
He has that golden faculty of enjoying the work he does so utterly,
and believing in it so entirely, that he can quite afford to
be poor. He whose daily work is in itself a pleasure ought not
to ask for riches: so I tell myself about my school-keeping, and
him about his parish. He takes up the conversion of sinners as
an immediate practical business, to be done and done now; he
preaches in all the little hills and dales and hollows and brown
school-houses for miles around, and chases his sinners up and
down so zealously, that they have, on the whole, a lively time of
it. He attacks drinking and all our small forms of country immorality
with a vigor sufficient to demolish sins of double their
size, and gives nobody even a chance to sleep in meeting. The
good farmers around here, some of whom would like to serve
Mammon comfortably, are rather in a quandary what to do.

They never would bear the constant hounding which he gives
them, and the cannonades he fires at their pet sins, and the way
he chases them from pillar to post, and the merciless manner in
which he breaks in upon their comfortable old habit of sleeping
in meeting, were it not that they feel that they are paying him
an enormous salary, and ought to get their money's worth out of
him, which they are certain they are doing most fully. Your
Yankee has such a sense of values, that, if he pays a man to thrash
him, he wants to be thrashed thoroughly.

My good friend preaches what they call New Divinity, by
which I understand the Calvinism which our fathers left us, in
the commencing process of disintegration. He is thoroughly and
enthusiastically in earnest about it, and believes that the system,
as far as Edwards and Hopkins have got it, is almost absolute
truth; but, for all that, is cheerfully busy in making some little
emendations and corrections, upon which he values himself, and
which he thinks of the greatest consequence. What is to the
credit of his heart is, that these emendations are generally in
favor of some original-minded sheep who can't be got into the
sheep-fold without some alteration in the paling. In these cases
I have generally noticed that he will loosen a rail or tear off a
picket, and let the sheep in, it being his impression, after all, that
the sheep are worth more than the sheep-fold.

In his zeal to catch certain shy sinners, he has more than once
preached sermons which his brethren about here find fault with,
as wandering from old standards; and it costs abundance of
bustle and ingenuity to arrange his system so as to provide for
exceptional cases, and yet to leave it exactly what it was before
the alterations were made.

It is, I believe, an admitted thing among theologians, that,
while theology must go on improving from age to age, it must
also remain exactly what it was a hundred years ago.

The parson is my intimate friend, and it is easy for me to see
that he has designs for the good of my soul, for which I sincerely
love him. I can see that he is lying in wait for me patiently, as
sometimes we do for trout, when we go out fishing together.
He reconnoitres me, approaches me carefully, makes nice little

logical traps to catch me in, and baits them with very innocent-looking
questions, which I, being an old theological rat, skilfully
avoid answering.

My friend's forte is logic. Between you and me, if there is a
golden calf worshipped in our sanctified New England, its name
is Logic; and my good friend the parson burns incense before it
with a most sacred innocence of intention. He believes that
sinners can be converted by logic, and that, if he could once get
me into one of these neat little traps aforesaid, the salvation of
my soul would be assured. He has caught numbers of the
shrewdest infidel foxes among the farmers around, and I must
say that there is no trap for the Yankee like the logic-trap.

I must tell you a story about this that amused me greatly.
You know everybody's religious opinions are a matter of discussion
in our neighborhood, and Ezekiel Scranton, a rich farmer
who lives up on the hill, enjoys the celebrity of being an atheist,
and rather values himself on the distinction. It takes a man of
courage, you know, to live without a God; and Ezekiel gives
himself out as a plucky dog, and able to hold the parson at bay.
The parson, however, had privately prepared a string of questions
which he was quite sure would drive Ezekiel into strait
quarters. So he meets him the other day in the store.

“How 's this, Mr. Scranton? they tell me that you 're an
atheist!”

“Well I guess I be, Parson,” says Ezekiel, comfortably.

“Well, Ezekiel, let 's talk about this. You believe in your
own existence, don't you?”

“No, I don't.”

“What! not believe in your own existence?”

“No, I don't.” Then, after a moment, “Tell you what,
Parson, ain't a going to be twitched up by none o' your syllogisms.”

Ezekiel was quite in the right of it; for I must do my friend
the parson the justice to say, that, if you answer one of his
simple-looking questions, you are gone. You must say B after
saying A, and the whole alphabet after that.

For my part, I do not greatly disbelieve the main points of

Calvinism. They strike me, as most hard and disagreeable things
do, as quite likely to be true, and very much in accordance with a
sensible man's observation of facts as they stand in life and nature.
My doubts come up, like bats, from a dark and dreadful
cavern that underlies all religion, natural or revealed. They are
of a class abhorrent to myself, smothering to my peace, imbittering
to my life.

What must he be who is tempted to deny the very right of his
Creator to the allegiance of his creatures? — who is tempted to
feel that his own conscious existence is an inflicted curse, and
that the whole race of men have been a set of neglected, suffering
children, bred like fish-spawn on a thousand shores, by
a Being who has never interested himself to care for their
welfare, to prevent their degradation, to interfere with their
cruelties to each other, as they have writhed and wrangled into
life, through life, and out of life again? Does this look like being
a Father in any sense in which we poor mortals think of fatherhood?
After seeing nature, can we reason against any of the harshest
conclusions of Calvinism, from the character of its Author?

Do we not consider a man unworthy the name of a good father
who, from mere blind reproductive instinct, gives birth to children
for whose improvement, virtue, and happiness he makes no provision?
and yet does not this seem to be the way more than half
of the human race actually comes into existence?

Then the laws of nature are an inextricable labyrinth, — puzzling,
crossing, contradictory; and ages of wearisome study have
as yet hardly made a portion of them clear enough for human
comfort; and doctors and ministers go on torturing the body and
the soul, with the most devout good intentions. And so forth,
for there is no end to this sort of talk.

Now my friend the parson is the outgrowth of the New
England theocracy, about the simplest, purest, and least objectionable
state of society that the world ever saw. He has a good
digestion, a healthy mind in a healthy body; he lives in a village
where there is no pauperism, and hardly any crime, — where
all the embarrassing, dreadful social problems and mysteries
of life scarcely exist. But I, who have been tumbled up and

down upon all the shores of earth, lived in India, China, and
Polynesia, and seen the human race as they breed like vermin,
in their filth and their contented degradation, — how can I think
of applying the measurements of any theological system to a reality
like this?

Now the parts of their system on which my dear friend the
parson, and those of his school, specially value themselves, are
their explanations of the reasons why evil was permitted, and
their vindications of the Divine character in view of it. They
are specially earnest and alert in giving out their views here, and
the parson has read to me more than one sermon, hoping to
medicate what he supposes to be my secret wound. To me
their various theories are, as my friend the doctor once said to
me, “putting their bitter pill in a chestnut-burr; the pill is bad, —
there is no help for that, — but the chestnut-burr is impossible.”

It is incredible, the ease and cheerfulness with which a man in
his study, who never had so much experience of suffering as even
a toothache would give him, can arrange a system in which the
everlasting torture of millions is casually admitted as an item.
But I, to whom, seriously speaking, existence has been for much
of my life nothing but suffering, and who always looked on my
existence as a misfortune, must necessarily feel reasonings of
this kind in a different way. This soul-ache, this throb of pain,
that seems as if it were an actual anguish of the immaterial part
itself, is a dreadful teacher, and gives a fearful sense of what the
chances of an immortal existence might be, and what the responsibilities
of originating such existence.

I am not one of the shallow sort, who think that everything for
everybody must or ought to end with perfect bliss at death.
On the contrary, I do not see how anything but misery in eternal
ages is to come from the outpouring into their abyss, of wrangling,
undisciplined souls, who were a torment to themselves and
others here, and who would make this world unbearable, were
they not all swept off in their turn by the cobweb brush of
Death.

So you see it 's all a hopeless muddle to me. Do I then believe
nothing? Yes, I believe in Jesus Christ with all my

heart, all my might. He stands before me the one hopeful
phenomenon of history. I adore him as Divine, or all of the
Divine that I can comprehend; and when he bids me say to
God, “Our Father which art in heaven,” I smother all my
doubts and say it. Those words are the rope thrown out to
me, choking in the waters, — the voice from the awful silence.
“God so loved the world that he gave his own Son.” I try
to believe that he loves this world, but I have got only so far
as “Help thou mine unbelief.”

Now, as to talking out all this to the parson, what good would
it do? He is preaching well and working bravely. His preaching
suits the state of advancement to which New England has
come; and the process which he and ministers of his sort institute,
of having every point in theology fully discussed by the
common people, is not only a capital drill for their minds, but it
will have its effect in the end on their theologies, and out of
them all the truth of the future will arise.

So you see my position, and why I am niched here for life, as
a schoolmaster. Come up and see me some time. I have a
housekeeper who is as ugly as Hecate, but who reads Greek.
She makes the best bread and cake in town, keeps my stockings
mended and my shirt-ruffles plaited and my house like wax,
and hears a class in Virgil every day, after she has “done her
dinner-dishes.” I shall not fall in love with her, though. Come
some time to see me, and bring your new acquisition.