mmit
it, can look in one another's faces without laughing, as the old
soothsayers did. Perhaps they can't and don't. How our sublime and
so-different Christian religion is to be administered in the future I
cannot pretend to say, but that the Church's hand is at its own throat I
am fully convinced. Here, more Popery, there, more Methodism--as many
forms of consignment to eternal damnation as there are articles, and all
in one forever quarrelling body--the Master of the New Testament put out
of sight, and the rage and fury almost always turning on the letter of
obscure parts of the Old Testament, which itself has been the subject of
accommodation, adaptation, varying interpretation without end--these
things cannot last. The Church that is to have its part in the coming
time must be a more Christian one, with less arbitrary pretensions and a
stronger hold upon the mantle of our Saviour, as He walked and talked
upon this earth.

Of family intelligence I have very little. Charles Collins continuing in
a very poor way, and showing no signs of amendment. He and my daughter
Katie went to Wiesbaden and thence to Nice, where they are now. I have
strong apprehensions that he will never recover, and that she will be
left a young widow. All the rest are as they were. Mary neither married
nor going to be; Georgina holding them all together and perpetually
corresponding with the distant ones; occasional rallyings coming off
here, in which another generation begins to peep above the table. I once
used to think what a horrible thing it was to be a grandfather. Finding
that the calamity falls upon me without my perceiving any other change
in myself, I bear it like a man.

Mrs. Watson has bought a house in town, to which she repairs in the
season, for the bringing out of her daughter. She is now at Rockingham.
Her eldest son is said to be as good an eldest son as ever was, and to
make her position there a perfectly independent and happy one. I have
not seen him for some years; her I often see; but he ought to be a good
fellow, and is very popular in his neighbourhood.

I have altered this place very much since you were here, and have made a
pretty (I think an unusually pretty) drawing-room. I wish you would come
back and see it. My being on the Dover line, and my being very fond of
France, occasion me to cross the Channel perpetually. Whenever I feel
that I have worked too much, or am on the eve of overdoing it, and want
a change, awa