, and
to point out to them, the ark of safety."

Correspondence between the father and son is not infrequent in these
days; for, since Reuben has slipped away from home control
utterly,--being now well past one and twenty,--the Doctor has forborne
that magisterial tone which, in his old-fashioned way, it was his wont
to employ, while yet the son was subject to his legal authority. Under
these conditions, Reuben is won into more communicativeness,--even upon
those religious topics which are always prominent in the Doctor's
letters; indeed, it would seem that the son rather enjoyed a little
logical fence with the old gentleman, and a passing lunge, now and then,
at his severities; still weltering in his unbelief, but wearing it more
lightly (as the father saw with pain) by reason of the great crowd of
sympathizers at his back.

"It is so rare," he writes, "to fall in with one who earnestly and
heartily seems to believe what he says he believes. And if you meet him
in a preacher at a street-corner, declaiming with a mad fervor, people
cry out, 'A fanatic!' Why shouldn't he be? I can't, for my life, see.
Why shouldn't every fervent believer of the truths he teaches rush
through the streets to divert the great crowd, with voice and hand, from
the inevitable doom? I see the honesty of your faith, father, though
there seems a strained harshness in it when I think of the complacency
with which you must needs contemplate the irremediable perdition of such
hosts of outcasts. In Adele, too, there seems a beautiful singleness of
trust; but I suppose God made the birds to live in the sky.

"You need not fear my falling into what you call the Pantheism of the
moralists; it is every way too cold for my hot blood. It seems to me
that the moral icicles with which their doctrine is fringed (and the
fringe is the beauty of it) must needs melt under any passionate human
clasp,--such clasp as I should want to give (if I gave any) to a great
hope for the future. I should feel more like groping my way into such
hope by the light of the golden candlesticks of Rome even. But do not be
disturbed, father; I fear I should make, just now, no better Papist than
Presbyterian."

The Doctor reads such letters in a maze. Can it indeed be a son of his
own loins who thus bandies language about the solemn truths of
Christianity?

"How shall I give thee up, Ephraim! How shall I set thee as Zeboim!"

LII.

In the early spring of 1842,--we are not