r. The turn
in your mind to what I deem healthier views took place about the time I
went abroad; and the relief your letters gave me while I was in Europe,
you can hardly have suspected. Now, it seems to me, you are liable to go
to the opposite extreme. The truth is, your intellectual insight seems
to me greater than your breadth of view, your penetration greater than
your comprehension; and the consequence has been a course of thought, as
I believe you are aware, somewhat zigzag.

Have I not thought of you, my dear fellow? I guess I have; and among
other things I have so thought of you that I now entirely confide in the
magnanimity of [198] your mind to receive with candor all this, and
more if I should say it,--saying it, as I do, in the truest love and
cherishing of you.

My love to E. and all the phalanstery.

As ever, yours,

ORVILLE DEWEY.

P. S. I read this letter to my wife last evening, and I told her of your
criticism on the sermon at Providence. She made the very rejoinder that
I made to you,--"The power to cast one's self on the great Christian
resource, to put one's self in relation with God the Father and with
spiritual help, is the very power which he denies to human nature, and
the very thing that Mr. H. contended for." Nor yet do I like your mode
of statement, for Christianity does not represent itself to me as a sort
of Noah's Ark, and human nature as in stormy waters,--to be saved if it
can get its foot on that plank, and not otherwise. I prefer my figure of
the shower specially sent on the feeble and half-withered plant. All the
divines of every school have always said that there is light enough in
nature, if with true docility and love men would follow it. Christ came
to shed more light on our path, not the only light; to lift up the lame
man, not to create limbs for him or to be limbs for him.

And I confess, too, that I do not like another aspect in the state of
your mind; and that is, that your newly wakened zeal should fasten,
as it seems to do, upon the positive facts and the supernaturalism of
Christianity. Not, as I think, that I undervalue them. I do not know
if any rational and thinking man that lays more stress on them in their
place than I do. But certainly there is something beyond to which they
point; and that is, the [199] deep spiritualism of the Gospel, the deep
heart's repose and sufficiency in things divine and infinite. If your
mind had fastened upon this as the newly found