ould not conceal from you--why should
I?--that which I cannot conceal from myself: that the darker side of
this great picture sometimes meets me, and it is vain that, shuddering,
I attempt to turn away from it. My mind involuntarily reverts to the sad
and solemn conviction that a fearfully great portion of the world round
me is dying in sin. This conviction is the result of that same
comparison I have mentioned before, between the principles and practices
it embraces, and those which the Almighty authoritatively enjoins: and
_entertaining it_ as I do, how, my beloved parent, can I bear to think
of my own seeking to wanton in the pleasures of life (I mean even its
innocent pleasures), or to give up my heart to its business, while my
fellow-creatures, to whom I am bound by every tie of human sympathies,
of a common sinfulness and a common redemption, day after day are
sinking into death? I mean, not the death of the body, which is but a
gate either to happiness or to misery, but that of the soul, the true
and the only true death. Can I, with this persuasion engrossing me, be
justified in inactivity? or in any measure short of the most direct and
most effective means of meeting, if in _any degree_ it be possible,
these horrible calamities? Nor is impotency and incompetency any
argument on the other side: if I saw a man drowning I should hold out my
hand to help him, although I were uncertain whether my strength would
prove sufficient to extricate him or not; how much more strongly, then,
is this duty incumbent when there are thousands on thousands perishing
in sin and ignorance on every side, and where the stake is not the
addition or subtraction of a few short years from a life, which can but
be a span, longer or shorter, but the doom, the irrevocable doom of
spirits made for God, and once like God, but now alienated and apostate?
And the remedy which God has provided for this portentous evil is not
like the ponderous and elaborate contrivances of men; its spear is not,
like Goliath's, the weaver's beam, but all its weapons are a few pure
and simple elements of truth, ill calculated, like the arms of David, in
the estimation of the world to attain their object, but yet capable of
being wielded by a stripling's hand, and yet more, 'mighty, through God,
to the pulling down of strongholds.'

What I have said is from the bottom of my heart, and put forward without
the smallest reservation of any kind: and I have said it thus,