"_November 8, 1844._ I feel that I must have some free communication with you, for my heart is full to overflowing. That I can understand all your internal trials, I have often assured you; and, strange as it may seem to you, it is from _experience_ that I am enabled to enter into them. In the solitude of my early days, the consciousness of unworthiness preyed upon my spirit, until I persuaded myself that every body despised me, that I was nothing to any one, that nobody could care for me for my own sake. Many and many a night have I lain and thought of this, and looked at life through this medium, until I wished that I had never lived, and in my agony have cried myself into perfect hysterics. Even my mother's love failed to satisfy me, for I thought it was only an involuntary feeling for an only child, not depending upon or growing out of my own deserts. O, how many precious hours of life have I thrown away in uselessness to others, and in misery for myself, by this morbid sensibility! Would that I could recall them! Would that my example might ward off from you like regrets! I had suffered many years from this cause before I discovered the true source of my trial, or caught a glimpse of its remedy. And when at last it flashed upon me, that it was the want of true Christian humility, not the real conviction of inferiority, which led to all this, I could not at once credit my own consciousness; and many and severe were the mental exercises by which I was led at last to understand and _feel_ the truth. I believe this to have been a constitutional tendency; and however much the demon may have been brought under subjection, there have been times all along life, that it has so striven for the mastery, that I have feared it might conquer. But knowing one's danger is more than half the security against it, and I have gained in happiness more than a compensation for the warfare. "... When we find ourselves disturbed in spirit, we very naturally refer to the exciting cause as an excuse for it; and however we may blame ourselves, we still feel that those whose wrong-doing irritates us are really the most to blame. But we must get away from this view of things, if we ever hope to improve ourselves. As long as we live in the world, we are to live with those who do wrong. We can never be perfect, nor can we find others who are; and our care should be, to learn so to control ourselves, that not only shall we cease to be tempted to do wrong by their wrong-doing, but also cease to tempt them by our own. And who can doubt that the best hope of improving them is by showing them the advantage of self-control?" * * * * *