Memoir of Mary L. Ware, Wife of Henry Ware, Jr.Hall, Edward B. (Edward Brooks)
Religion
Memoir of Mary L. Ware, Wife of Henry Ware, Jr.
Hall, Edward B. (Edward Brooks)
Unitarians -- United States -- Biography; Ware, Mary L. (Mary Lovell), 1798-1849
To answer it unfavorably, to yield to this natural reluctance to publish
any thing designed to be private, and in its nature personal, would
deprive us of the best biographies that are written. It would restrict
to single families, and to a brief period, the knowledge of facts and
features, of all most reliable, most valuable. Indeed, it is this very
fact of humility and reserve, of freedom and naturalness, indulged in
confidential communion and the quiet of home, that reveals most the
reality of virtue, force of character, disinterested nobleness, and the
power of religion. Who is willing that the knowledge of such examples
should be withheld from the many who crave it, and whom it would
stimulate and bless? Shall we make no sacrifice of our own feelings,
supposing it to require one, shall we hoard exclusively for our own use
the richest of God's gifts, when those by whom the gifts have come to us
spent their lives in service and sacrifice for us? To these obvious
considerations, we will add our firm faith in the knowledge which
departed friends have of the motives from which we are acting, and of
the influence which their own modest virtues and lowly efforts on earth
may exert upon those remaining here; thus continuing, in a higher and
surer way, the very work for which the loved and the pure always live,
and are willing to die.
It is in point, not only for our immediate purpose, but for the
exhibition in part of the character we would delineate, to say that
these were the feelings of Mrs. Ware herself, in regard to a memoir of
her husband. Public as a large portion of his life was, she shrunk from
the exposure of that which was private, and which seemed to be sacredly
committed to her own keeping. She remembered, too, his peculiar
sensitiveness in this connection, and the injunctions he gave when under
the influence of disease and depression. But another voice came to her
from his present higher abode and larger vision; and thus she wrote to a
friend, of the conflict and the decision, in language applicable now to
her own case:--"I cannot tell you the agony it has given me at times, to
realize that that sacred inner life, which I had felt was my own
peculiar trust, was no longer mine, but was to be shared by the whole
world. But this was sinful, selfish, earthly; and I have gradually left
it all far behind, and can now only be glad that such a life is shown
for the aid and encouragement of others."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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