position," to borrow the politicians' phrase, that
I begin to fear you will be out of patience before you come to the part
of my letter I care most about your reading.

What I want to say is this. When these matters are talked about before
persons of different ages and various shades of intelligence, I think
one ought to be very careful that his use of language does not injure
the sensibilities, perhaps blunt the reverential feelings, of those
who are listening to him. You of the sterner sex say that we women have
intuitions, but not logic, as our birthright. I shall not commit my sex
by conceding this to be true as a whole, but I will accept the first
half of it, and I will go so far as to say that we do not always care
to follow out a train of thought until it ends in a blind cul de sac, as
some of what are called the logical people are fond of doing.

Now I want to remind you that religion is not a matter of intellectual
luxury to those of us who are interested in it, but something very
different. It is our life, and more than our life; for that is measured
by pulse-beats, but our religious consciousness partakes of the
Infinite, towards which it is constantly yearning. It is very possible
that a hundred or five hundred years from now the forms of religious
belief may be so altered that we should hardly know them. But the sense
of dependence on Divine influence and the need of communion with the
unseen and eternal will be then just what they are now. It is not the
geologist's hammer, or the astronomer's telescope, or the naturalist's
microscope, that is going to take away the need of the human soul for
that Rock to rest upon which is higher than itself, that Star which
never sets, that all-pervading Presence which gives life to all the
least moving atoms of the immeasurable universe.

I have no fears for myself, and listen very quietly to all your debates.
I go from your philosophical discussions to the reading of Jeremy
Taylor's "Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying" without feeling that I have
unfitted myself in the least degree for its solemn reflections. And, as
I have mentioned his name, I cannot help saying that I do not believe
that good man himself would have ever shown the bitterness to those who
seem to be at variance with the received doctrines which one may see in
some of the newspapers that call themselves "religious." I have kept
a few old books from my honored father's library, and among them is
another