hat is perhaps one of the fullest
expositions of his religious faith to which he ever gave expression came
from him in a most remarkable letter, which Doctor Talmage gave to Bok.

"New York, December 12, 1886.

"My Dear Friend:

"Your most tender epistle from Mansfield, Ohio, of December 9 brought
here last night by your son awakens in my brain a flood of memories.
Mrs. Sherman was by nature and inheritance an Irish Catholic. Her
grandfather, Hugh Boyle, was a highly educated classical scholar, whom I
remember well,--married the half sister of the mother of James G. Blaine
at Brownsville, Pa., settled in our native town Lancaster, Fairfield
County, Ohio, and became the Clerk of the County Court. He had two
daughters, Maria and Susan. Maria became the wife of Thomas Ewing, about
1819, and was the mother of my wife, Ellen Boyle Ewing. She was so
staunch to what she believed the true Faith that I am sure that though
she loved her children better than herself, she would have seen them die
with less pang, than to depart from the "Faith." Mr. Ewing was a great
big man, an intellectual giant, and looked down on religion as something
domestic, something consoling which ought to be encouraged; and to him
it made little difference whether the religion was Methodist,
Presbyterian, Baptist, or Catholic, provided the acts were 'half as
good' as their professions.

"In 1829 my father, a Judge of the Supreme Court of Ohio, died at
Lebanon away from home, leaving his widow, Mary Hoyt of Norwalk, Conn.
(sister to Charles and James Hoyt of Brooklyn) with a frame house in
Lancaster, an income of $200 a year and eleven as hungry, rough, and
uncouth children as ever existed on earth. But father had been kind,
generous, manly with a big heart; and when it ceased to beat friends
turned up--Our Uncle Stoddard took Charles, the oldest; W. I. married
the next, Elisabeth (still living); Amelia was soon married to a
merchant in Mansfield, McCorab; I, the third son, was adopted by Thomas
Ewing, a neighbor, and John fell to his namesake in Mt. Vernon, a
merchant.

"Surely 'Man proposes and God disposes.' I could fill a hundred pages,
but will not bore you. A half century has passed and you, a Protestant
minister, write me a kind, affectionate letter about my Catholic wife
from Mansfield, one of my family homes, where my mother, Mary Hoyt,
died, and where our Grandmother, Betsey Stoddard, lies buried. Oh, what
a flood of memories come up at the