ds, who are also
my friends, lamented to me the growth of this inclination.
But I told them that I think she is to be greatly
congratulated on the event. She has lived in great poverty
of events. In form and years a woman, she is still a child,
having had no experiences, and although of a fine, liberal,
susceptible, expanding nature, has never yet found any
worthy object of attention; has not been in love, nor been
called out by any taste, except lately by music, and sadly
wants adequate objects. In this church, perhaps, she shall
find what she needs, in a power to call out the slumbering
religious sentiment. It is unfortunate that the guide who
has led her into this path is a young girl of a lively,
forcible, but quite external character, who teaches her the
historical argument for the Catholic faith. I told A. that I
hoped she would not be misled by attaching any importance to
that. If the offices of the church attracted her, if its
beautiful forms and humane spirit draw her, if St. Augustine
and St. Bernard, Jesus and Madonna, cathedral music and
masses, then go, for thy dear heart's sake, but do not go
out of this icehouse of Unitarianism, all external, into an
icehouse again of external. At all events, I charged her to
pay no regard to dissenters, but to suck that orange
thoroughly.

And this on the Church and the common people written the year before:

The Church aerates my good neighbors and serves them as a
somewhat stricter and finer ablution than a clean shirt or a
bath or a shampooing. The minister is a functionary and the
meeting-house a functionary; they are one and, when they
have spent all their week in private and selfish action, the
Sunday reminds them of a need they have to stand again in
social and public and ideal relations beyond
neighborhood,--higher than the town-meeting--to their fellow
men. They marry, and the minister who represents this high
public, celebrates the fact; their child is baptized, and
again they are published by his intervention. One of their
family dies, he comes again, and the family go up publicly
to the church to be publicised or churched in this official
sympathy of mankind. It is all good as far as it goes. It is
homage to the Ideal Church, which they have not: which the
actual