to his conscience that he feels compelled to inflict upon you the slightest pain on their account, you may rest assured that his religious fibre is still full of vitality. If it were deadened, he would argue very much as follows. He would say: "These old doctrines of the Church are not of sufficient consequence for me to disturb my mother about them. What is the use of alluding to them ever?" And then you would have no anxiety; and he himself would have the feeling of settled peace which comes over a battle-field when the dead are buried out of sight. It is the peculiarity--some would say the evil, but I cannot think it an evil--of an age of great intellectual activity to produce an amount of critical inquiry into religious doctrine which is entirely unknown to times of simple tradition. And in these days the critical tendency has received a novel stimulus from the successive suggestions of scientific discovery. No one who, like your son, fully shares in the intellectual life of the times in which he lives, can live as if this criticism did not exist. If he affected to ignore it, as an objection already answered, there would be disingenuousness in the affectation. Fifty years ago, even twenty or thirty years ago, a highly intellectual young man might have hardened into the fixed convictions of middle age without any external disturbance, except such as might have been easily avoided. The criticism existed then, in certain circles; but it was not in the air, as it is now. The life of mankind resembles that of a brook which has its times of tranquillity, but farther on its times of trouble and unrest. Our immediate forefathers had the peaceful time for their lot; those who went before them had passed over very rough ground at the Reformation. For us, in our turn, comes the recurrent restlessness, though not in the same place. What we are going to, who can tell? What we suffer just now, you and many others know too accurately. There are gulfs of separation in homes of the most perfect love. Our only hope of preserving what is best in that purest of earthly felicities lies in the practice of an immense charity, a wide tolerance, a sincere respect for opinions that are not ours, and a deep trust that the loyal pursuit of truth cannot but be in perfect accordance with the intentions of the Creator, who endowed the noblest races of mankind with the indefatigable curiosity of science. Not to inquire was possible for our forefathers, but it is not possible for us. With our intellectual growth has come an irrepressible anxiety to possess the highest truth attainable by us. This desire is not sinful, not presumptuous, but really one of the best and purest of our instincts, being nothing else than the sterling honesty of the intellect, seeking the harmony of concordant truth, and utterly disinterested.