"Lady, my father was an enthusiast like yourself. He went to America in the hope of doing his part to sanctify the career of intelligence and of liberty opened for the first time in the world's history for the laboring classes as a body. He helped to build churches, to found schools in conjunction with ecclesiastical authority, and did whatever a secular could do to guide a movement which he respected and sympathized with, but one which he felt would be exposed to great peril, unless that divine principle which is the true source of government both in the family and in the state, could be brought to bear upon it. {43} He feared that 'liberty' on a mere rationalistic principle, that is, standing on purely human strength, severed from the divine idea which gave it being, would, however beautiful in its poetry, soon degenerate into license; soon succumb beneath the empire of passion, and be led to tolerate laws subversive of true progress. It was the aim of his life to inculcate that 'Truth is one;' that the human idea cannot be disjoined from the divine idea without fatal results; that real earthly happiness, through differing in intensity, is the same in essence as that we look to enjoy hereafter in heaven. That all earthly intelligence, an earthly beneficence which seeks permanence, must be founded on the repression of such inordinate desire as impede and frustrate the development and employment of our higher faculties. For all beauty, harmony, and love must be brought out in accordance with that law of the spirit, which he has given us, as our rule of action, we being children of the spirit. "The working out of this purpose is the legacy which my dear father, lately deceased, has bequeathed unto his children. To this purpose I have consecrated myself; and because I know your high power of intellect, because I have witnessed your zeal, your energy, your devotedness to good, I ask you to become the help-meet to carry out this purpose.