Secretary of State, and his ardent young comrade a
clerk in his department. They seemed equals in 1802; in 1845, they had
grown so far apart, that the excellent Bingham writes to Webster as to
a demigod.

In these pleasant early letters of Daniel Webster there are a thousand
evidences of a good heart and of virtuous habits, but not one of a
superior understanding. The total absence of the sceptical spirit
marks the secondary mind. For a hundred and fifty years, _no_ young
man of a truly eminent intellect has accepted his father's creeds
without having first called them into question; and this must be so in
periods of transition. The glorious light which has been coming upon
Christendom for the last two hundred years, and which is now beginning
to pervade the remotest provinces of it, never illumined the mind of
Daniel Webster. Upon coming of age, he joined the Congregational
Church, and was accustomed to open his school with an extempore
prayer. He used the word "Deist" as a term of reproach; he deemed it
"criminal" in Gibbon to write his fifteenth and sixteenth chapters,
and spoke of that author as a "learned, proud, ingenious, foppish,
vain, self-deceived man," who "from Protestant connections deserted to
the Church of Rome, and thence to the faith of Tom Paine." And he
never delivered himself from this narrowness and ignorance. In the
time of his celebrity, he preferred what Sir Walter Scott called "the
genteeler religion of the two," the Episcopal. In his old age, his
idea of a proper sermon was incredibly narrow and provincial. He is
reported to have said, late in life:--

"Many of the ministers of the present day take their text
from St. Paul, and preach from the newspapers. When they do
so, I prefer to enjoy my own thoughts rather than to listen.
I want my pastor to come to me in the spirit of the Gospel,
saying, 'You are mortal! your probation is brief; your work
must be done speedily; you are immortal too. You are
hastening to the bar of God; the Judge standeth before the
door.' When I am thus admonished, I have no disposition to
muse or to sleep."

This does not accord with what is usually observed in our churches,
where sermons of the kind which Mr. Webster extolled dispose many
persons to sleep, though not to muse.

In the same unquestioning manner, he imbibed his father's political
prejudices. We hear this young Federalist call the Republican party
"the Jac