by an equal facility of stripping himself, fragment by fragment, of his early creed, till at last he walks through this bleak world in such a gossamer gauze of transparent “spiritualism,” that it makes you both shiver and blush to look at him.  Your old acquaintance P——­, true to his youthful qualities (which now have most abundant exercise), who has the “charity which believeth all, things,” though certainly not that which “bareth all things,” goes about apologizing for all religious systems, and finding truth in every thing;—­our beloved Harrington, on the other hand, bewildered by all this confusion, finds truth—­in nothing.

Yet you must not imagine that our religious maladies are at present more than sporadic; or that the great bulk of our population are at present affected by them:  they still believe the Bible to be the revealed Word God.  Should these diseases ever become epidemic, they will soon degenerate into a still worse type.  Many apostles of Atheism and Pantheism amongst our classes say (and perhaps truly), that this modern “spiritualism” is but a transition state.  In that case, you will have to recall, with a deeper meaning, the song of Byron, which you told me gave you such anguish, as you paced the deck on the evening in which lost sight of Old England,—­“My native land, night!”

I have sometimes mournfully asked myself, whether the world may not yet want a few experiments as to whether it cannot get on better without Christianity and the Bible; but I hope England is not destined be the laboratory.

I almost envy your happier lot I picture to myself your unsophisticated folks, just reclaimed from the grossest barbarism and idolatry, receiving the simple Gospel (as it ought to be received) with grateful wonder, as Heaven’s own method of making man wise and happy; reverencing the Bible as what it is,—­an infallible guide through this world to a better; “a light shining in a dark place.”  They listen with unquestioning simplicity to its disclosures, which find an echo in their own hearts, and with a reverence which is due to a volume which has transformed them from savages into men, and from idolaters into Christians.  They are not troubled with doubts of its authenticity or its divinity; with talk of various readings and discordant manuscripts; with subtle theories for proving that its miracles are legends, or its history myths, or with any other of the infinite vagaries of perverted learning.  Neither are they perplexed with the assurances of those who tell them that, though divine, the Bible is, in fact, a most dangerous book, and who would request them, in their new-born enlightenment, to be pleased to shut their eyes, and to return to a religion of ceremony quite as absurd and almost as cruel as the polytheism they have renounced.  I imagine you and your little flock in the Sabbath stillness of those mountains and green valleys, of which you give me such pleasant descriptions, exhibiting a specimen of a truly primitive Christianity; I imagine that the peace within is as deep as the tranquillity without.