Beecher sympathized with him in his feelings, and made an effort to satisfy his request, but failed, as the church then believed that there were but three ways out of it, death, dismissal to another church, or excommunication. Accordingly, at a church meeting on April 29, 1829, in which Mr. Beecher took no part, the following sentence was passed:-- “Whereas certain charges have been made against Brother N. P. Willis, which, in the opinion of this church has been fully proved, namely: Absence from the communion of this church and attendance at the theatre as a spectator; and whereas he has neglected to appear before the church to answer the said charges, although duly notified; and has not given to the church satisfactory evidence of penitence, but has evinced by a letter laid before the church an entirely different state of feeling; therefore voted, That Mr. Nathaniel P. Willis be, and he hereby is, in the name and by the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ, excommunicated from this church.” Deacon Willis was naturally grieved by this turn of affairs, although he acquiesced silently in the church’s decision. Theatre going, indeed, was an offense against family, as well as church discipline. Naturally, also, the object of this _significavit_ always afterwards thought and spoke with some bitterness of “the charity of a sect in religion.” He never renounced definitely his Christian belief. He never became skeptical; was not at any time, in fact, a thinker on such themes and subject to the speculative doubts which beset the thinker. He remained through life easily impressible in his religious emotions. “Worldling as I am,” he wrote many years after, “and hardly as I dare claim any virtue as a Christian, there is that within me which sin and folly never reached or tainted.” But this ended his connection with organized Christianity, and he ceased for a long time to be a church-goer. His position in Boston was also made painful by an unsuccessful love affair. He had paid court to Mary Benjamin, a woman of uncommon beauty of person and graces of mind and character, the sister of Park Benjamin and afterwards the wife of the historian Motley. She returned his feeling and the two were engaged to be married, but the engagement was broken through the determined opposition of the lady’s guardian, Mr. Savage. Willis carried this thorn in his side for years, and it gave him many hours of bitter homesickness while abroad. In a letter written a few days after landing in England, in the summer of 1834, he said:--