ny business in a house of deep affliction. In a
congregation ever so familiar there is trial enough of this kind. If my
friend is sick or dying, I go to his bedside of course, but it is as a
friend,--to say a word or many words as the case may be; to look what
I cannot say; to do what I can. But to come there, or to come to the
desolate mourner, in an official capacity,--there is something in this
which is in painful conflict with my ideas of the simple relations of
man with man. Now all this difficulty is greatly increased when one
enters upon a new ministration in a congregation of strangers. Therefore
on every account I must say, no more pastoral relations for me. I cannot
take [207] up into my heart another heap of human chance and change
and sorrow. Do you not see it? Why, what takes place in New Bedford now
moves me a hundred times more than all else that is in the world. And so
it will always be with all that befalls my brethren in the Church of the
Messiah.

As to the world's need of help, I regard it doubtless as you do; and I
am willing and desirous to help it from the pulpit as far as I am able.
But I cannot hold that sort of irregular connection with the
pulpit called "supplying "; nor can I go out on distant missionary
enterprises,--to Cincinnati, Mobile, or New Orleans. The first would
yield me no support; and as to the last, I must live in my family.
Besides, there is sphere enough with the pen; and study may do the world
as much good as action. And there is no doubt what direction my studies
must take. Why, I have written out within a week--written incontinently
in my commonplace book, my pen would run on--a thesis on Pantheism
nearly as long as a sermon. And as to preaching, what ground have I
to think that mine is of any particular importance? Not that I mean to
affect any humility which I do not feel. I profess that I have quite a
good opinion of myself as a preacher. Seriously; I think I have one or
two rather remarkable qualifications for preaching,--a sense of reality
in the matter of the vitality of the thing, and then an edge of feeling
(so it seems to me) which takes off the technical and commonplace
character from discourse. Oh! if I could add, a full sense of the
divineness of the thing, I should say all. Yet something of this, too, I
hope; and I hope to grow in this as I hope to live, and do not dread
to die. But though I think all this, with all due modesty, it does not
[208] follow that oth