... A
woman should, I think, love her husband better than anything on earth
except her own soul; which, I think, a man should respect above
everything on earth but his own soul: and there, my dear, is a very
pretty puzzle for you, which a good many people have failed to solve. It
is, indeed, a pretty difficult problem; and perhaps you have chosen, if
not the wiser and better, at any rate the easier and safer part.

God bless you, dear friend.

Ever affectionately yours,
F. A. B.

HARRISBURG, Friday, November 14th, 1837.

Thank you, dearest Harriet, for your epitome of the history of the New
Testament. I have read the same things, in greater detail, more than
once.... I have repeatedly gone over accounts of the history and
authenticity of the Gospel narratives; but I have done so as a duty, and
in order to be able to give to others some reason for the faith that is
in me,--not really because I desired the knowledge for its own sake; and
therefore my memory had gradually lost its hold of what I had taken into
my mind, chiefly for the satisfaction of others, to enable me to make
sufficient answers upon a subject whose best evidence of truth seems to
me to reside in itself, and to be altogether out of the region of
logic.... Christ received the last and perfect revelation of moral
truth, brought it into the world, preached it by his practice, and bore
witness to it by his death; and since he came, every holy life and
death, in those portions of the globe where his name is known, has been
moulded upon his teaching and example; and those individuals least
inclined to acknowledge it have unconsciously imbibed the influence of
the inspiration which he breathed into the soul of humanity. He has
saved, and is daily and hourly saving, the world: and so far from
imagining the possibility of any end to the work he has begun, or any
superseding of his revelation by any other, it appears to me that
civilized societies and nations calling themselves Christian have hardly
yet begun to comprehend, believe, or adopt his teaching; under the
influence of which I look for the regeneration of the race through the
coming ages: it will extend above and beyond all discoveries of science
and developments of knowledge, and more and more approve itself the only
moral and spiritual theory that will at once carry forward an