Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D.: Edited by His DaughterDewey, Orville
Religion
Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D.: Edited by His Daughter
Dewey, Orville
Dewey, Orville, 1794-1882
I DON'T see but you must insert these articles in the "Inquirer" as
"Communications." Some of them will have things in them that cannot
possibly be delivered as Wegotisms. Don't be stiff about the matter.
I tell you there is no other way; and indeed I think it no harm, but
an advantage, to diversify the form, and leave out the solemn and
juridical Wego sometimes, for the more sprightly and "sniptious" Ego.
To his Daughter Mary.
WASHINGTON, May, 1852.
DEAREST MOLLY,--To be sure, how could you? And, indeed, what did you
for? Oh! for little K.'s sake. Well, anything for little K.'s sake.
Indeed, it's the duty of parents to sacrifice themselves for their
children. It's the final cause of parents to mind the children. Poor
little puss! We shall feel relieved when we hear she is in New York,
and safe under the sisterly wing. I am afraid she is getting too big
for nestling. How I want to see the good little comfort! Is she little?
Tell us how she looks and does.
Yesterday, beside preaching a sermon more than half new, and attending
a funeral (out of the society), I read skimmingly more than half
Nichol's "Architecture of the Heavens." I laid aside the book
overwhelmed. What shall we do? What shall we think? Far from our
[226] Milky Way,--there they lie, other universes,--rebuke resolved
by Rosse's telescope into stars, starry realms, numerous, seemingly
innumerable, and as vast as our system; and yet from some of them
it takes the light thirty--sixty thousand years to come to us: nay,
twenty millions, Nichol suggests, I know not on what grounds. And
yet in the minutest details such perfection! A million of perfectly
formed creatures in a drop of water! I do not doubt that it is this
overwhelming immensity of things that leads some minds to find a sort
of relief, as it were, in the idea of an Infinite Impersonal Force
working in all things. But it is a child's thought. Nay, does not the
very fact that my mind can take in so vast a range of things lead me
better to conceive of what the Infinite Mind can do? An ant's mind, if
it had one, might find it just as hard to conceive of me.
With love to you two miserable creatures, away from your parents,
Thine ever,
ORVILLE DEWEY.
To the Same.
[Undated.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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