d to
conceive better than to combine. I wonder if the world, or rather
the human mind, will ever really grow decrepit, and the fountain of
beauty in men's souls run dry to the dregs; or will the
manifestations only change, and the eternal spirit reveal itself in
other ways?...

On our way home I had a long and interesting talk with John about
the different forms of religious faith into which the gradual
development of the human mind has successively expanded; each, of
course, being the result of that very development, acting on the
original necessity to believe in and worship and obey something
higher and better than itself, implanted in our nature. It seems
strange that he has a leaning to Roman Catholicism, which I have
not. Our Protestant profession appears to me the purest
creed--form--that Christianity has yet arrived at; but, I suppose,
a less spiritual one, or perhaps I should say external
accompaniments, affecting more palpably the senses and imagination,
are wholesome and necessary to the cultivation and preservation of
the religious sentiment in some minds. Catholicism was the faith of
the chivalrous times, of the poetical times, of times when the
creative faculty of man poured forth in since unknown abundance
masterpieces of every kind of beauty, as manifestations of the
pious and devout enthusiasm. Protestantism is undoubtedly the faith
of these times; a denying faith, a rejecting creed, a questioning
belief, its evil seems essentially to coincide with the worst
tendency of the present age, but its good seems to me positive and
unconditional, independent of time or circumstance; the best, in
that kind, that the believing necessity in our nature has yet
attained. Rightly understood and lived up to, the only service of
God which is intellectual freedom, as all His service, lived up to,
under what creed soever, is moral freedom. And it is in some sort
in spite of myself that I say this, for my fancy delights in all
the devout and poetical legendary conceptions which the stern hand
of reason has stripped from our altars.

I found a letter at home from Emily Fitzhugh; she writes me word
she has been revising my aunt Siddons's letters; thence an endless
discussion as to the nature of genius, what it is. I suppose really
nothing bu