"I have always thought that your having a strong virtuous attachment when you first went to the University was a great security to you. The blessed effects of this safeguard we shall one day know. It will be a mutual augmentation of attachment and happiness to find that those whom we loved best had been rendered the instruments more or less of our salvation.... "That religious feelings are contagious (if I may use the word so), is undeniable, and there may be temporary accesses of religious feeling, which may produce a temporary effervescence, with little or none of the real work of God on the heart. But you and I, who are not Calvinists, believe that even where the influence of the Holy Spirit was in the heart, that Spirit may be grieved and quenched. The good seed in the hearts of the stony-ground hearers is just an instance in point. When my friend Terrot was chaplain, of the _Defence_ I think, great numbers of the rough sailors were deeply affected by his conversation and sermons, of whom, I think he said, thirty only appeared in the sequel to be permanently changed." "_January 4, 1831._ "You are now a man possessed of as much leisure as you are ever likely to possess. What think you of laying in materials for a Doctrinal and practical History of Religion in England, in different classes of society, and of males and females, from the time of the Reformation to the present time or perhaps to 1760. It was once my wish to write such a work, but the state of my eyes long ago rendered it impracticable. The sources from whence the particulars for the work must be derived are chiefly Lives and Memoirs. Numbers of these have been published of late years, and the object is one which would give opportunities for exercising sagacity, as well as candour. There is this also of good in it that, _nullus dies sine lineâ_, you might be continually finding some fresh fact or hint, which would afterwards be capable of being turned to good account. The Annual Registers and the different magazines and reviews would be rich mines of raw material. Do meditate on these suggestions. How very strong has dear Henry become both in his opinions and his language! Really if he were to go into the law, which Robert seems to think not improbable, there would be considerable danger of his getting into quarrels which might draw on him challenges, the more probably because people might suppose from his parentage, &c., that he most likely would not answer a call to the field. I must say that the becoming exempt, even in the world's estimate, from the obligation to challenge or being challenged may be no unfair principle of preference of an ecclesiastical profession to any other. The subject of duelling is one which I never saw well treated; a very worthy and sensible man, a Scotchman who was shipwrecked in Madagascar, I forget his name (was it Duncan?) sent me one, his own writing, but I thought it _naught_. And now my very dear boy farewell."