ols who
vainly attempt to thwart His purpose? or will they be permitted to say
that they are "tempted of God"? Indeed, dear Harriet, I must abide in
the conviction that we manufacture misery for ourselves which was never
appointed for us; and because Mercy, unfailing and unbounded, out of
these very miseries of our own making, draws blessed balsam for our use,
I cannot believe that it ordained and inflicted all our sufferings.

I began this letter yesterday, and am again sitting under my piazza,
with S----, in a buff coat, zigzagging like a yellow butterfly about the
lawn, and Margery mounting guard over her, with such success as you may
fancy a person taking care of a straw in a high wind likely to have....
I have just been enjoying the pleasure of a visit from one of the
members of the Sedgwick family. They are all my friends, and I do think
all and each in their peculiar way good and admirable. Catharine
Sedgwick has been prevented from coming to me by the illness of the
brother in whose family she generally spends the winter in New York....
Like most business men here, he has lived in the deplorable neglect of
every physical law of health, taking no exercise, immuring himself for
the greater part of the day in rooms or law courts where the atmosphere
was absolute poison; and using his brains with intense application,
without ever allowing himself proper or sufficient relaxation. Now, will
you tell me that Providence _intended_ that this man should so labor and
so suffer? Why, the very awfulness of the consequence forbids such a
supposition for a moment. Or will you, perhaps, say that this dire
calamity was sent upon him in order to try the fortitude, patience, and
resignation of his wife, within a month of her confinement; or of his
sister, whose nervous sensibility of temperament was of an order to have
been driven insane, had they not been mercifully relieved from the worst
results of the fatal imprudence of poor R----?

Whenever I see that human beings do act up as fully as they can to _all_
the laws of their Maker, I shall be prepared to admire misery, agony,
sickness, and all tortures of mind or body as excellent devices of the
Deity, expressly appointed for our benefit; but while I see obvious and
abundant natural causes for them in our _disobedience_ to His laws, I
shall scarce come to that conclusion, in spite of all the good which He
makes for us out of our evil. I know we must sin, but we sin more than
we