o give
publicity to a private communication. I have become somewhat more
intimately acquainted with the writer of it than in the earlier period
of my connection with this establishment, and I think I may say have
gained her confidence to a very considerable degree.

MY DEAR SIR: The conversations I have had with you, limited as they
have been, have convinced me that I am quite safe in addressing you with
freedom on a subject which interests me, and others more than myself. We
at our end of the table have been listening, more or less intelligently,
to the discussions going on between two or three of you gentlemen on
matters of solemn import to us all. This is nothing very new to me. I
have been used, from an early period of my life, to hear the discussion
of grave questions, both in politics and religion. I have seen gentlemen
at my father's table get as warm over a theological point of dispute
as in talking over their political differences. I rather think it has
always been very much so, in bad as well as in good company; for you
remember how Milton's fallen angels amused themselves with disputing on
"providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate," and it was the same thing
in that club Goldsmith writes so pleasantly about. Indeed, why should
not people very often come, in the course of conversation, to the
one subject which lies beneath all else about which our thoughts are
occupied? And what more natural than that one should be inquiring about
what another has accepted and ceased to have any doubts concerning?
It seems to me all right that at the proper time, in the proper place,
those who are less easily convinced than their neighbors should have
the fullest liberty of calling to account all the opinions which others
receive without question. Somebody must stand sentry at the outposts of
belief, and it is a sentry's business, I believe, to challenge every one
who comes near him, friend or foe.

I want you to understand fully that I am not one of those poor nervous
creatures who are frightened out of their wits when any question is
started that implies the disturbance of their old beliefs. I manage to
see some of the periodicals, and now and then dip a little way into
a new book which deals with these curious questions you were talking
about, and others like them. You know they find their way almost
everywhere. They do not worry me in the least. When I was a little girl,
they used to say that if you put a horsehair into