"_Framingham, August, 1842._ At last, dear John, the great crisis has passed, the great movement is made. We have changed our home, and are no longer to live together under the same circumstances. The change is indeed great to us all, but I feel that for you it is greater than to any one else, and therefore it is that I am impelled to use my first quiet moment in expressing my deep sense of the trial of your present position, and most heartily sympathize with the soul-stirring emotion which belongs to it. To you it is indeed a very important turning-point in existence, and when one looks only upon the momentous responsibilities which it involves, it is not strange that the heart should sink, and the question should involuntarily arise to one's lips, 'How can this change be borne, how can such duties be met?' I have felt sometimes, in looking at the singular combination of events, by which you should be separated from your father, just when you were commencing the most trying and important period of life, as if it were almost too hard; and as if it would have been not only easier, but safer, to have been able to feel your way a little before you absolutely floated off under your own sole guidance. But a second thought has always satisfied me that the arrangement of Providence was the best, although for the time the most painful. Standing forth in your lot, as an ambassador for Christ to the world, you cannot be too soon led to rely solely on his teaching for direction, and it cannot but be best that you should be compelled, by the removal of earthly succor, to go only to Him who is 'the way, the truth, and the life,' for strength in the hour of need." * * * * * "My dear John: You are now passing through that ordeal which I have long looked forward to as inevitable at some period, sometimes with an almost irresistible desire to avert it by opening to you pages of my own painful experience in self-education; sometimes with an uncontrollable impatience to hasten it, that, being past, you and I and all might be enjoying the happiness it might produce. It is one of the most difficult questions to decide how far, and when, to make opportunities, or wait for them to come in the natural order of things; we should very decidedly wait, if we were sure they would come at some time,--but there is the rub....