ans of
arriving at the end.

Well, you will go before I come to New York. God bless and keep you, and
bring you safely back!

Ever your friend,

ORVILLE DEWEY.

There are some passages in an unpublished sermon, preached by my father
at Church Green, in 1858, which I will quote presently, as illustrative
of the same tone of thought shown in these letters. His clinging to
the miraculous element in the life of Jesus, while refusing to base any
positive authority upon it, is equally characteristic of him, arising
from the caution, at once reverent and intellectual, which made him
extremely slow to remove any belief, consecrated by time and affection,
till it was proved false and dangerous, and from his thorough conviction
that every man stands or falls by so much of the Infinite Light and Love
as he is able to receive directly into his being. He was conservative
by [297] feeling, and radical by thought, and the two wrought in him
a grand charity of judgment, far above what is ordinarily called
toleration.

These are the extracts referred to:

"Society as truly as nature, nay, as truly as the holy church, is a
grand organism for human culture. I say emphatically,--as truly as the
holy church; for we are prone to take a narrow view of man's spiritual
growth, and to imagine that there is nothing to help it, out of the pale
of Christianity. We make a sectarism of our Christian system, even as
the Jews did of the Hebrew, though ours was designed to break down all
such narrow bounds; so that I should not wonder if some one said to
me,--Are you preaching the Christian religion when you thus speak of
nature and society?' And I answer, 'No; I am speaking of a religion
elder than the Christian.' . . .

"There was a righteousness, then, before and beside the Christian. Am I
to be told that Socrates and Plato, and Marcus Antoninus and Boethius,
had no right culture, no religion, no rectitude? and they were cast upon
the bosom of nature and of society for their instruction, and of that
light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.'"

To his Daughter Mary.

ST. DAVID'S, Sept. 20, 1867.

. . . THINK of my having read the whole of Voltaire's "Henriade" last
week! But think especially of eminent French critics, and Marmontel
among them (in the preface), praising it to the stars, saying that some
of the [298] passages are superior to Homer and Virgil! However, it is
really better than I expected, and I read on, par