I am particularly at leisure, having demitted all care of the farm to Mr. Charles, and committed all the income thereof to him, down to the smallest hen's-egg. Your mother is always doing something, and always growing handsomer and lovelier, so that I told her yesterday I should certainly call her a sa-int, if she was n't always a do-int I have nothing to tell of myself; no stitches or aches to commemorate, being quite free and whole in soul and body, and, freely and wholly Your loving father, ORVILLE DEWEY. [229] To Rev. Henry W. Bellows. SHEFFIELD, July 24, 1852. MY DEAR BELLOWS,--Amidst all this lovely quiet, and the beautiful outlooks on every side to the horizon, my thoughts seem ever to mingle with the universe; they bear me beyond the horizon of life, and your reflections, therefore, fall as a touching strain upon the tenor of mine. Experience, life, man, seem to me ever higher and more awful; and though there is constantly intervening the crushing thought of what a poor thing I am, and my life is, and I am sometimes disheartened and tempted to be reckless, and to say, "It's no matter what this ephemeral being, this passing dust and wind, shall come to,"--yet ever, like the little eddying whirlwinds that I see in the street before me, this dusty breath of life struggles upward. I am very sad and glorious by turns; and sometimes, when mortality is heavy and hope is weak, I take refuge in simple resignation, and say: "Thou Infinite Goodness! I can desire nothing better than that thy will be done. But oh! give me to live forever!--eternal rises that prayer. Give me to look upon thy glory and thy glorious creatures forever!" What an awful anomaly in our being were it, if that prayer were to be denied! And what would the memory of friends be, so sweet and solemn now,--what would it be, but as the taper which the angel of death extinguishes in this earthly quagmire? After you went away, I read more carefully the splendid article on the "Ethics of Christendom;"{21} and I confess that my whole moral being shrinks from the position [230] of the writer (which brings down the majesty of the Gospel almost to the level of Millerism), that Jesus supposed the end of the world to be at hand, and that he should come in the clouds of heaven, and be seated with his disciples on airy thrones, to judge the nations. No; the false double ethics of the pulpit, which I have labored, though less successfully, all my life to expose, has its origin, I believe, in later superstition, and not in the teachings of Christ. {FN 21: From the "Westminster Review," vol. lvii. p. 182, or, in the American edition, p. 98.} The passages referred to by the writer, I conceive to be more imaginative, and less formalistic and logical, than he supposes. To the Same. WASHINGTON, Dec. 28, 1852.